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| - I think it would have been more palpable if the back story included a prehistory of how humankind had derailed its own progress with genetic enhancements that backfired in subsequent generations that lead up to the one that relies on surrogates. The story could then be explained as taking place 300 years from now, but the reason the Surrogate World being featured looks like the early 21st Century is because it was at this time that humans had their "last hurrah" as regular people with everyday problems before the onslaught of revolutionary genetic engineering. The writers could still use the same plot devices and hero figure with Bruce Willis, but this time his chance to recapture his humanity isn't so clear cut and cozy. He, as well as all other "puppet" humans would have to re-enter the real world as unplugged regular human beings much in the same vein as Robert Duvall's character at the end of THX-1138.
* If they all use surrogates except when they are eating or using the bathroom, why are all the real life people NOT morbidly obese? Bruce Willis is in at the ABSOLUTE WORST in average condition for a man of his age, and his wife is also incredibly thin. So these people who spend most of their lives sitting in a chair are perfectly healthy, yet that lady from the settlement who shot Willis' surrogate and had not used a surrogate for god knows how long is overweight. HOW DOES THAT WORK?!?!?!
* Calm down. Some people are just skinny or fat regardless of their eating and exercise habits. Call it good genes. Alternatively, it's possible people who use surrogates use them so much they put off eating, so they'd get skinnier, sort of like how occasionally you'll hear about a Korean MMORPG player who starved to death. Meanwhile, non-surrogate users, like us, are always in their bodies, and given they're sort of exiles, don't have access to the same pastimes and entertainment, and may end up eating more because of it.
* Truth in Television, poorer people often end up fat because they only have access to lower quality food (i.e. McDonald's). People without surrogates tended to be poor. But I would expect most everybody to be in much more horrible shape, since there's more to fitness than just weight. It's possible that Greer exercised with his real body once in a while since he doesn't seem to be so surrogate-obsessed (in the comic, at least). But like the above person said I'd wonder why there aren't bigger concerns about people starving to death or suffering other starvation-related damage.
* Ironically, it's actually cheaper to cook your own food than to eat out all the time. I can buy a kilo of rice, some ham, and a 2-liter of soda for the cost of one Big Mac Combo.
* Home computers, which are vastly cheaper than Surrogates, and have proven value haven't managed to reach to 98% market saturation in the more 14 or so years that they have been widely available. Believing that an artificial body that serves no discernible purpose for the average person,just defies logic.
* The artificial bodies do serve a purpose, at least in the comic. Because everybody's in an easily replaceable artificial body people are rarely ever in real danger. You don't have to worry about getting in a car crash or mugged or any of those other risks you take every time you leave your house. I'd also think that anybody who had enough money and was dissatisfied with their natural body (unattractive people, transgender people, etc.) would buy a surrogate. Those benefits change life on a whole different level than just getting a computer.
* If everyone is now "attractive" wouldn't ugly have been the new "pretty?"
* No. Humans do have some biological guidelines to what attraction is, even if they vary and are influenced by culture. Being different looking doesn't make you automatically attractive, especially when everyone else is symmetrical, thin, with good skin, big bright eyes, and shiny hair. The Elephant Man wouldn't get laid at Chippendales.
* But what about unconventional beauty and Chubby Chasers and the like?
* Here's what gets me. Quick rundown of the situation: nearly the entire human population decides to use robots via telepresence to live their lives, largely for safety reasons. Someone comes along, zaps the surrogates with some sort of electromegablaster, and it not only blows out the surrogate's eyes and CPU, it causes the user's eyes to burst and brains to turn to a bloody gray soup. The movie makes references to the blaster dealie being capable of bypassing the "failsafe," which is presumably the safety device that prevents the headsets and eye pieces from causing their brain to blow up under normal conditions. My question is this: why design the headsets (controllers) to have the capability of causing eye bursts and brain melts in the first place? Liquifying someone's brains is not likely to be just an unfortunate side effect of the technology, particularly since brain liquification is no easy task in the first place. The head pieces seem to operate the surrogates by receiving and translating a user's brainwaves, so that's probably not going to need a failsafe to prevent brain liquification. It's not entirely certain how the brain receives sensory input from the surrogate, of course; based on the devices, it's probably a combination of visual images, via the eye pieces, and possibly electrical impulses from the headset sent directly into the brain, but jeez...just how much electricity is needed to implant sensory input? Is it enough to potentially melt someone's brain and cause their eyeballs to burst without a failsafe in place?
* The "failsafe" wasn't specifically a "prevent this from melting your brain" failsafe. It was a general failsafe, along the lines of, "Make sure that any damage to the surrogate doesn't feedback on the user." The whole point was that the weapon did something entirely unexpected and out of the ordinary.
* Ah, true enough; the "failsafe" would, I suppose, block everything up to and including the whole issue with melted brains and popped eyeballs. Nevertheless, there is still the problem that the head and eye pieces shouldn't be able do that sort of physical damage to their user unless they were specifically designed with that capability. What's really being pointed out is that the plot of the movie relies on a variation of Explosive Instrumentation. This is combined with the general absence of an explanation for what sort of insubstantial energy or Applied Phlebotinum could travel through the airwaves (or whatever), make its way through a presumably electronic system, and cause the eye pieces and headset to somehow gain a lethal property they either didn't already have or shouldn't have been built with in the first place. Yes, I get that this problem was hand waved (or just ignored altogether) for the sake of moving the plot along; but this is, after all, a Just Bugs Me page.
* This is a stupid movie invention. The original comic did not have this weapon. The attacker simply used a device that fries the surrie without harming the operator. Nobody actually wanted to kill 98% of the population (well, less, since the other half of the world would be sleeping), just shut down all the surries. Of course, it makes for less drama, so murder was added for the film.
* Others have touched on it but I'm going to state it outright. It's the all or nothing nature of Surrogate use. Not just the timeframe, which is unrealistic enough, but there are basically only three viewpoints portrayed in the movie. Surrogate for everything but eating and using the bathroom, Ludd Was Right and the computer tech who is viewed as an eccentric weirdo who avoids being a pariah because he possess valuable skills. There's no one who uses a Surrogate most of the time but occasionally likes to get out and engage in their hobby sans Surrogate, or alternately someone who spends most of their time au naturale but uses a Surrogate for things like extreme sports for safety/practicality reasons. Or to boil it down there are no shades of grey.
* Why would the military choose to have an endless Redshirt Army of Surrogates? Today, from what I gather, it costs something like $40,000 to train and outfit one infantry soldier. How much do Surrogates cost? A good deal more than that, I'm guessing. And you would still need to train the human soldiers, because Surrogates don't use weaponry and practice proper tactics on their own. The whole thing just doesn't seem remotely cost effective, although it would save lives--which is the emphasis of the entire purpose of Surrogates in the film.
* Furthermore, why even fight a war on the ground if you have that level of robotics technology? We already have Predator drones. Surely those would become even more advanced Twenty Minutes Into the Future, so why even bother with infantry by that time?
* While infantry might be cheaper to train than a surrogate, they're...disposable. You're thinking of surrogates as infantry themselves, instead of a force multiplier. If the surrogate gets shut down, just log into a new one. Again and again, until you take that hill. Admittedly, I haven't seen the movie.
* That's pretty much the idea in the film. Also, if a Surrogate cost "a good deal more than" $40,000 a pop, then there's no flipping way that 90% of the population would have one, or that you'd be able to rent a replacement at any time at a corner store--as the previous poster mentioned, they're treated as disposable. They would have to be much, much, much cheaper than that for the premise of the movie to work at all.
* Not to mention the military surrogates aren't exactly the most detailed in the face. It looks very cheap and plastic-y compared to a civilian one.
* Estimates of the cost to deploy a single soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan range from $500,000 to over a million dollars per year. Plus, if that soldier gets injured or dies, then the government pays for a lifetime of health care or death benefits for the soldier's family. You can ship and house an entire platoon's worth of expendable surrogates in a shipping crate, they don't eat, don't get sick, don't feel fear, don't suffer PTSD, they're totally immune to biological/chemical/radiological attacks, and if one goes down there's always a replacement. Sounds cost-effective to me.
* So, what crime would Greer be convicted of? Vandalism? Sabotage? Gross criminal negligence?
* All of the above.
* Not quite. As explained above, nobody can convict him of anything, because nobody can testify with certainty that he wilfully caused the surrogates to be destroyed. For all the techie knew he just thought a bit too long and was about to hit Y, like every good citizen would, when he was shot by the cop. And the cop himself, of course, didn't know the surrogate was now moved by Greer, so he had no fault either. The blame would, most likely, go to Canter - who, of course, can't be arrested, what with being dead and all.
* That's nice, except Greer said he was Greer just before he was about to hit the button, he damaged an FBI's surrogate in order to carry out his plan, while on camera and out of any surrogate, I imagine there would be some cameras in Canter's room in the first place...
* He damaged a surrie who the techie can attest was a murderer, in the course of investigating a murder. Why would Canter have cameras in his own room, especially when it had the surries for The Prophet in there and there doesn't seem to have been anyone else going in in years? Even if there were cameras, Greer can still make up some plausible excuse, like a glitch, and all they'd show is him sitting in a chair.
* How did anyone know that Agent Peters surrogate was "rogue", which would lead to the need to send the equivalent of a SWAT team to the movie's version of Mr Universe? Seems that as long as a person's surrogate is functioning and the person themselves doesn't notify others of a bodyjacking, nobody really notices who controls whose surrogate because they're assumed to be secure. You could say one of the watchers in the hall of monitors noticed, but surely if they're monitoring by proxy (i.e. a simple surrogate being controlled by an off-site human) they would have noticed long before the Canter hijacked Agent Peters broke in and cuffed the Mr Universe character, plugged in the super-weapon (not sure how that would work either; it's a projectile, how can it also be a virus?!) and generally started tearing things asunder.
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