From the very little that I’ve seen of and about Surrogates, it appears that (or at least I read into it that) the movie attempts to grapple these questions around the themes of fear and beauty. Timely, I suppose, given both in the past decade have been important political and economic currencies. The ability to take risks without fear of harm, and the promise of easily eliminating the ugly stick we were born with at will. It seems ironic that Surrogates are promoted as having the beauty of the human body, since it is the technology that makes the body beautiful, whereas actual human bodies are flawed by their biology. With the removal of such important flaws, there is no reason to leave the second life we’ve made, and all inhabitants of the real world have been replaced.

I guess if asked the God question about this, I would wonder if this movie is like many others in promoting the notion that it is better to be a flawed creature than an imperfect creator. In the Truman Show we see what happens when humans create a perfected virtual world and place an unwitting human inside it. In both I, Robot and the Terminator trilogy, humans let man-made computer logic determine humanity’s destiny to find that it will turn against them. In Surrogates, humans lose themselves in the virtual world they’ve made, refusing to leave it. Moreover, the real world is replaced with the virtual – actual streets and lanes are used by virtual beings. In the realm of popular western narrative, it is only logical that this world order must fail, as virtual reality can only exist alongside natural/God-made/etc reality, and that neither robots nor humans can survive in an otherwise constructed universe.