Surrogates
Sep. 22nd, 2012 01:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethSo that made no sense.
I watched the movie 'Surrogates', which is about a world where 98% of people use brain controlled androids to do their walking and talking for them. And, incidentally, no, you can't get 98% of people to wear trousers, let alone a remote controlled robot body. But the film has a whole world where everyone wears a surrogate and never leaves their living room.
Okay.
So, the part that failed utterly: I kept waiting for them to make some kind of argument about why this was a bad thing. I mean, they're saying the bots interface with your brain so it's a totally real experience, all the senses, and you can wear whatever body you want and it'll be faster and stronger and have night vision and all the bells and whistles. There is no down side!
In the entire movie there are two people arguing against wearing these things.
On the one hand there's the hero-cop, who wants his real wife and not her robot body even though she wants to wear her robot body and seems to have some ongoing pain problems in her own body if the pill collection is anything to go by. I'm trying to find his point of view here, but really? He just looks like a selfish dick with some kind of ownership issues. She's got scars and a meds collection, are we supposed to read that as an addiction? Well probably because the whole wearing a surrogate thing is compared to an addiction, for no readily apparent reason. But the only way I could read it is that she's one of those the surrogates were first designed for, a person with physical disabilities the bots can compensate for, presumably from the car crash that killed their son. Him wanting her to spend time with him in her own body just looks like him telling her to hurt and be limited because he wants flesh not bots. I cannot muster sympathy there.
On the other hand there's the major anti-surrogates guy, and he's the crazy person who attempts mass murder. No, wait, if 98% of people are wearing surrogates and he attempts to kill everyone wearing a surrogate, that's bigger than mass murder, that's up into genocide. He's the one ranting about surrogates being an addiction. But the one and only argument he makes about why it's better to be human is about how it's better to fear death and get your pulse pounding. That makes no sense. None.
So the conclusion of the movie has the hero-cop save all the lives but destroy all the surrogates.
So we're supposed to believe surrogates are evil?
They didn't sell that. Not for an instant. The film never made that argument.
So you're left at the end wondering why on earth he was party to this mass destruction of property, and how the hell it's meant to change anything. New ID chips for everyone and business as usual. It's just stupid.
Plus it is, in the paradigm of that world, like taking away everyone's wheelchairs in one go. And all the other assistive tech. Every disabled person on the planet just lost their limbs, eyes, ears, whatever.
Are we actually supposed to cheer?
Oh, wait, the bad guy was the only actual explicitly physically disabled person in the movie. So maybe we're meant to ... no, I don't even know, that's just screwed up.
Also, there's a voiceover to say there have been no human casualties. No. They've shown us that everyone wears their surrogates to work, and they've shown us that there are real hospitals for the physical health needs of the humans operating those hospitals. That means every surgeon was disconnected at the same instant. Every nurse. Every ambulance driver. And every pilot. Planes dropping out of the sky time. Flash Forward dealt with this far better, on only a brief loss of consciousness. This is supposed to be everyone everywhere. I don't care if their operators are at home, we're looking at serious fires and ongoing health disasters. Turn off all the people who are keeping the world ticking over? Learn what happens when it skips a tick.
So basically the end of the movie shows us human hero-cop reunited with human wife and watching all the human neighbours step outside into the sunshine and connect with each other.
At which point we're supposed to call it a happy ending.
But under the logic of the world he's just killed a ton of people, whatever the voiceover says, and I can't see any reason to do it.
Early on when the internet was new my mum didn't grok that there were actually people on the other end of the computer. She didn't know why I was on the computer all the time, thought I should be talking to people instead. Then when my dad died we got condolences from all over the world, and my mum understood. Computers don't isolate us, they connect us. There's a lot of real people out there.
So in a world where everyone wears robot bodies to talk to everyone else who happens to be wearing robot bodies, really, what is the problem? There is no problem! It's all people connecting with people, slightly technologically assisted.
By not understanding that, Surrogates utterly fails as both SF and a story. It doesn't even make its argument, because it thinks it too obvious to make. And it's exactly wrong, the opposite thing is obvious.
World of surrogates: Yaays, bring it on.
I watched the movie 'Surrogates', which is about a world where 98% of people use brain controlled androids to do their walking and talking for them. And, incidentally, no, you can't get 98% of people to wear trousers, let alone a remote controlled robot body. But the film has a whole world where everyone wears a surrogate and never leaves their living room.
Okay.
So, the part that failed utterly: I kept waiting for them to make some kind of argument about why this was a bad thing. I mean, they're saying the bots interface with your brain so it's a totally real experience, all the senses, and you can wear whatever body you want and it'll be faster and stronger and have night vision and all the bells and whistles. There is no down side!
In the entire movie there are two people arguing against wearing these things.
On the one hand there's the hero-cop, who wants his real wife and not her robot body even though she wants to wear her robot body and seems to have some ongoing pain problems in her own body if the pill collection is anything to go by. I'm trying to find his point of view here, but really? He just looks like a selfish dick with some kind of ownership issues. She's got scars and a meds collection, are we supposed to read that as an addiction? Well probably because the whole wearing a surrogate thing is compared to an addiction, for no readily apparent reason. But the only way I could read it is that she's one of those the surrogates were first designed for, a person with physical disabilities the bots can compensate for, presumably from the car crash that killed their son. Him wanting her to spend time with him in her own body just looks like him telling her to hurt and be limited because he wants flesh not bots. I cannot muster sympathy there.
On the other hand there's the major anti-surrogates guy, and he's the crazy person who attempts mass murder. No, wait, if 98% of people are wearing surrogates and he attempts to kill everyone wearing a surrogate, that's bigger than mass murder, that's up into genocide. He's the one ranting about surrogates being an addiction. But the one and only argument he makes about why it's better to be human is about how it's better to fear death and get your pulse pounding. That makes no sense. None.
So the conclusion of the movie has the hero-cop save all the lives but destroy all the surrogates.
So we're supposed to believe surrogates are evil?
They didn't sell that. Not for an instant. The film never made that argument.
So you're left at the end wondering why on earth he was party to this mass destruction of property, and how the hell it's meant to change anything. New ID chips for everyone and business as usual. It's just stupid.
Plus it is, in the paradigm of that world, like taking away everyone's wheelchairs in one go. And all the other assistive tech. Every disabled person on the planet just lost their limbs, eyes, ears, whatever.
Are we actually supposed to cheer?
Oh, wait, the bad guy was the only actual explicitly physically disabled person in the movie. So maybe we're meant to ... no, I don't even know, that's just screwed up.
Also, there's a voiceover to say there have been no human casualties. No. They've shown us that everyone wears their surrogates to work, and they've shown us that there are real hospitals for the physical health needs of the humans operating those hospitals. That means every surgeon was disconnected at the same instant. Every nurse. Every ambulance driver. And every pilot. Planes dropping out of the sky time. Flash Forward dealt with this far better, on only a brief loss of consciousness. This is supposed to be everyone everywhere. I don't care if their operators are at home, we're looking at serious fires and ongoing health disasters. Turn off all the people who are keeping the world ticking over? Learn what happens when it skips a tick.
So basically the end of the movie shows us human hero-cop reunited with human wife and watching all the human neighbours step outside into the sunshine and connect with each other.
At which point we're supposed to call it a happy ending.
But under the logic of the world he's just killed a ton of people, whatever the voiceover says, and I can't see any reason to do it.
Early on when the internet was new my mum didn't grok that there were actually people on the other end of the computer. She didn't know why I was on the computer all the time, thought I should be talking to people instead. Then when my dad died we got condolences from all over the world, and my mum understood. Computers don't isolate us, they connect us. There's a lot of real people out there.
So in a world where everyone wears robot bodies to talk to everyone else who happens to be wearing robot bodies, really, what is the problem? There is no problem! It's all people connecting with people, slightly technologically assisted.
By not understanding that, Surrogates utterly fails as both SF and a story. It doesn't even make its argument, because it thinks it too obvious to make. And it's exactly wrong, the opposite thing is obvious.
World of surrogates: Yaays, bring it on.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-22 03:51 pm (UTC)The thing that gets me is that we're all already wearing surrogates -- every one of us is really a fat sessile slug, weighing roughly three pounds each. But we're born in our surrogates, so it's easy to forget (or never realize) that. They're marvels of evolutionary advancement, but I'm all for ditching them as soon as we can come up with better.
~
no subject
Date: 2012-09-22 04:27 pm (UTC)~