Surrogates (film)

The action takes place in the future. At the beginning of the 21st century, Dr. Lionel Canter conducted research to make life easier for people with disabilities. He developed an interface that allows a disabled person, deprived, for example, of the ability to walk, to control an android using the power of nerve impulses. At the same time, the android behaves completely like a person, and the person - the operator - feels and experiences all the sensations that his electronic double experiences. The invention, which allowed people with disabilities to live a full life, soon began to be used and healthy. As a result, the world has changed. 98% of the world's population do not leave their homes, and at this time, surrogate robots live their lives. They can look like anything, always have an ideal appearance, can be of any gender and do almost unimaginable things without any harm to the operator. The US Army also uses surrogates in conducting "peacekeeping operations." However, the so-called dreadlocks are opposed to the new world order - a group of people who do not recognize the benefits of using "soulless robots." They formed colonies, where surrogates are forbidden to enter, and minimized communication with the outside world.

The main character of the film is FBI agent Tom Greer ( Bruce Willis ). He, like most people, uses an official substitute that resembles the owner in appearance in his young years. However, deep down, Greer is tired of this surrogate world and wants normal human communication even with his wife, who after a car accident that claimed the life of their son and left a scar on her face, does not leave her room, preferring to communicate with the world only through a beautiful, slim surrogate.

The story begins with the fact that a certain young man, a representative of the " golden youth ", goes instead of an opera, as his father recommended to him by phone, to a night club. On leaving the club, he is unexpectedly attacked by a man without a surrogate who destroys a surrogate with one shot from an unusual weapon.

Greer and his partner Peters arrive at the crime scene. Since people do not kill other people for a long time, they simply destroy surrogates (which, however, is quite expensive, since a surrogate is extremely expensive), such "killings" have long been considered vandalism . However, an attempt to find a surrogate operator for a young man turns into a tragedy - it turns out that his operator, who turned out to be the son of the surrogate inventor, founder and former owner of Virtual Self Industries, Lionel Canter, was killed along with the surrogate. During a conversation with him, it turns out that the killer was hunting for his father, and not for his son, since the murdered man used one of his father's surrogates. Greer begins the investigation, trying to find out whether the existence of a weapon is possible that, by destroying a surrogate, kills the operator (which, according to a representative of VSI - a producer of surrogates - contradicts the very essence of using this technology).

As a result of investigative and search actions, during which it turns out that the special services have full control over the network of surrogates, Greer attacks the trail of the killer, a certain Miles Strickland, but he is trying to hide in a dreadlock colony. During the chase, Greer has to test the power of an unknown device, but he remains alive and continues to pursue in the colony, where the local population stands up to defend the suspect and destroys the surrogate of Greer. The dreadlock leader known as the Prophet kills Strickland and takes possession of weapons.

Dreadlocks consider an attempt to catch a man on their territory as an act of aggression, and the police, to hush up the case, removes Greer and his partner from the investigation, refusing him to issue a new official surrogate. Greer risks personally going out into the street, and is trying with considerable difficulty to adapt to an independent life among surrogates. He goes to the dreadlock colony to continue the investigation. The prophet calls on his followers to embark on a warpath with the "mighty of this world" who have turned humanity into a crowd of soulless robots. Greer is escorted from the colony, but at the exit he is waiting for a limousine with a Canter surrogate, offering to focus on finding out the origin of the weapon.

During the investigation, Greer once again goes to Colonel Brandon and finds out that the weapon is a viral emitter that infects the surrogate’s operating system with a virus that blocks its functioning through optical sensors (eyes). However, when developing weapons, it turned out that the virus not only hit the surrogate, but also cracked the operator’s built-in protection, killing him. After that, all work in this direction was stopped, and the materials destroyed. Greer also learns that the developer of this virus is the same Virtual Self Industries. In exchange for this information, Greer tells the colonel that the only surviving workable copy of the device is at the Prophet's.

An unknown person enters the house to Peters, kills her and transfers her surrogate to someone else's control. The military conducts an operation on the territory of the colony, the results of which show that the Prophet is just a surrogate. Surrogate Peters at this time crawls into the FBI financial statements. It becomes clear that Strickland was hired by the FBI, and that the direct boss Greer and Peters, Agent Stone, who gave the viral emitter to Strickland and ordered him to be killed, was involved. Stone, in turn, carried out the assignment to VSI, who wanted to get rid of the objectionable Canter, who was disappointed in his own invention. Surrogate Peters shares information with Greer. Greer pays a visit to Stone. In Stone’s office, he disables his surrogate, breaks into his computer, copies information and, in a hurry, gets into a car to Peters waiting for his surrogate. After making sure that Greer got the necessary files, the surrogate arranges an accident. While Greer wakes up after the collision, the surrogate steals a data flash drive and a weapon case lying in the back seat, which the dreadlocks handed over to him. Greer tries to chase him, but again has an accident. He easily manages to get away from colleagues who are used to catching robots on a remote control with a radio beacon in the back of his head.

Greer sets off for Canter's mansion. It turns out that Canter is both the Prophet, and the murderer of Peters, and the one who controlled her surrogate. Meanwhile, Canter, using Peter's surrogate, infiltrates the FBI headquarters. Using a virus emitter, he kills Stone and proceeds to download the virus, which will destroy not only all surrogates, but also their operators. Canter tells Greer that the idea of ​​creating surrogates was only to give people with disabilities the opportunity to live a full life, but after he was fired from VSI, his invention was used only for profit. Suddenly, Canter takes the poison pill and dies. Greer plugs into the Peters surrogate and isolates the operators, but decides not to save the surrogates. Half a second after this decision, a police sniper destroys the Peters surrogate, and the process can no longer be reversed: surrogates all over the world are falling down.

The film ends with a panorama of cities where people take to the streets from their houses, apparently for a long time not leaving their homes. They are dressed in housecoats, confused and moving uncertainly. Against the background of streets filled with disconnected surrogates, a news announcer speaks: “So far we do not know when they will be, and whether all surrogates will be restored at all. So for now, we have to live by ourselves. ”

• Bruce Willis - Agent Tom Greer
• Trevor Donovan is a substitute for Tom Greer (the actor was used as a model of Motion capture technology to visualize the image of the “young” surrogate Tom Greer)
• Rada Mitchell - Agent Peters
• Rosamund Pike - Maggie Greer
• Boris Kojo - Stone
• James Cromwell - Dr. Lionel Canter
• James Ginti - Canter 's Surrogate
• Ving Rhames - Prophet
• Jack Nosworthy - Strickland
• Devin Ratray - Bobby
• Michael Kudlitz - Colonel Brandon

• At the time of the movie’s release on the screen, there were already devices that tried, to one degree or another, to provide the functionality of "surrogates" ^[1] .
• At the beginning of the film, an excerpt from the video is shown, in which testing of the Raytheon Sarcos exoskeleton was shown ^[2] .
• Actor James Cromwell, who played the role of Dr. Canter, also previously played the role of creator of robots - in the film " I, Robot, " he played Dr. Alfred Lanning, lead designer and theorist at US Robotics Corporation.
• The telepresence technologies shown in the film were described back in 1963 by Stanislav Lem in the Sum of Technology ^[3] under the name Teletaxia (the principle was also explained in some of his fantastic works, for example, the use of television doubles in World on Earth ).
• In the story of the Strugatsky brothers “ Monday begins on Saturday ” there are doubles that instead of real people are in line for salaries.
• In Sergey Lukyanenko ’s novel " Fake Mirrors " there were a kind of surrogates (but in virtual reality), as well as weapons that kill operators through their doubles.
• Eye-based video interfaces for controlling surrogates are similar to the readers of the Sixth Day movie
• The very idea of ​​a similar technology of the future was also used in another film released in 2009 - Avatar .
• In the scene of the battle of Americans with helicopters “for the restoration of peace”, Russian-made Ka-50 and Mi-28N helicopters are shown, moreover, as enemies.

• Telepresence device

• Surrogates on the Internet Movie Database
• Surrogates on the allmovie website  
• Surrogates on the Rotten Tomatoes website
• "Surrogates" (Russian) on the poster