Does It Play On A Mac? – Unreal Anthology

This installment looks at Unreal Anthology, the collection of five games from the Unreal/Unreal Tournament franchise.

Surrogates

Today’s technology makes it easier for most anyone to hide behind a digital mask. Everything from the personas some project in chat rooms, posts and tweets that say things they might never even whisper in real life to the domination of Photoshop applied to models on magazine covers and MySpace pages that are decried as unattainable, to the stories of singers’ voices being automatically corrected with Autotune.

In this movie a majority of the population lives through their titular surrogates: robots that transmit all sensory input to their controller sitting in a remote control chair in their home. If there was any type of setting that is ripe allegory for our online habits, this is it. The problem is that it doesn’t dive very deep at all. We are to believe that surrogates can look like anything the owner can imagine, but aside from one shot on a subway with one surrogate covered in metallic blue skin sitting next to a female with mohawk of actual spikes the main character’s robots are not much more than idealized versions of the actors with impeccable hair and skin just on the unrealistic side of smooth. Considering at least one character’s emotional and physical scars (Greer’s wife, played by Rosamund Pike) it would seem to me that her surrogate might be a chance to adopt a wildly different appearance in order to distance herself from her past.

While controlling a surrogate, one is not supposed to be able to be harmed. Your surrogate get crushed, burned, or otherwise destroyed, you’re still safe in your chair. Yet someone has found a way to kill people through their surrogates. This idea was something that could really add some unique twists to the usual murder/investigation plot. Yet this too felt a bit pedestrian. When FBI agents Greer (Bruce Willis) and Peters (Rahda Mitchell) relate that this is the first murder to occur in years, they do it with an inexplicable air of nonchalance. It didn’t make this event very significant for me. It might as well have been another body on Law and Order. A story like this should bring characters who aren’t what they seem, so in a setting where anyone can be anything, it doesn’t lend itself to a surprise the audience couldn’t foresee. I blame another part of this on the trailers released for this movie. This is unfortunately one of those instances where the trailer pretty much gives away the ending of the movie. I tried to find a trailer to embed here that didn’t have any of that footage, but all of them have that footage, so I’m not even embedding one in this post. This is probably one of the worst offenses marketing has made on a film’s trailer.

The movie isn’t bad. It’s certainly not unwatchable. The tribe and I were entertained by this movie. Bruce Willis, who has played the investigator role many times before does a great job in the lead. Rosamund Pike did some excellent work in creating distinct performances for when she was controlling her surrogate and when she was herself. Many of the other players in this film could have taken cues from her, as this was one of the few things that really touched on how people behave in public and private.

In the end I’d say this is worth seeing as a matinee once or when it comes out for rent. It might be worth a purchase. But that’s about it. Decent story. Interesting setting. But it leaves you with a sense that a lot more could have been made from the material.