Although its producers may not know it, "Surrogates" illustrates an extreme version of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats's statement that "our servants" will do the living for us, presumably to allow the artist to concentrate wholly on the exercise of the imagination. In the new movie the familiar science-fiction subject of robotics also approaches a kind of extreme, showing an entirely recognizable, otherwise normal world in which machines apparently perform most human activities.

The picture shows that advances in electronics, computer science, and cybernetics allow a great many people to function by means of surrogates, humanoid robots that their "operators" control through the transmission of brain waves. Each person's surrogate, which may be any age, sex, or race, moves, speaks, and acts for the operator, apparently transmitting its sensations back to its master. The humans recline in special chairs, while their surrogates conduct their daily lives in their place, a triumph of the virtual and the vicarious.

Naturally, in the great tradition of technological utopias, something goes terribly wrong. A mysterious assailant zaps a surrogate with an electronic device that not only disables the automaton but also sends a fatal current back to its operator, turning the science-fiction story into a cop flick. The FBI, in the person of agent Bruce Willis and his partner Radha Mitchell, investigate the homicide and soon encounter a series of such double killings, apparently orchestrated by a contemporary version of the classic Mad Scientist (James Cromwell), who plans an apocalyptic worldwide obliteration of all surrogates and their operators.

The science-fiction and detective plots ultimately combine in a series of familiar car chases, shootouts, and explosions, which tend to diminish the movie's genuinely fascinating conceptual possibilities. The film intermittently pauses to show the relationship between Willis and his wife, for example, which exists only on the level of surrogacy; he wants to restore the human dimension, but for several reasons, including grief over a lost child, his wife, like most of the people in the film, prefers to live through her beautiful automaton.

Bland, handsome, well dressed, with their expressionless features and faintly stiff demeanor, the surrogates resemble animated department store mannequins, all of them much better looking than their operators. Willis represents an exception to that condition; when he appears in the flesh, so to speak, his partner notices to her surprise that his surrogate looks quite a lot like him, though with his face smoothed of lines and irregularities and adorned with a most improbable toupee.

Though the director tends to sentimentalize them, the most important themes in the movie involve the familiar conflict between the human and the mechanical, the real and the virtual, the experiential and the vicarious. Several communities of humans, for example, establish special reservations where they forbid any machines and dwell in their own organic paradise, working the land with old-fashioned methods and mounting a semi-religious campaign against the surrogates.

The movie draws some ironic and sadly appropriate contrasts between the humans and their surrogates. The polished, impeccably attired, efficient automatons move smoothly through the routines of their daily lives, while the humans who occupy the reservations exhibit obvious imperfections - they all appear dirty, scruffy, flabby, and overweight. When the operators, mostly dressed in pajamas and bathrobes, leave their high-tech Barcaloungers and stumble out on the streets to discover the disaster that strikes their so much more attractive and effective surrogates, they blink and tremble in the sunlight, puzzled by the unaccustomed experience of reality in what amounts to a brave new world.

Too often settling for the usual sensational stunts and pyrotechnics, the film unfortunately neglects to explore the numerous issues it raises, including the ancient problem of defining humanity itself. "Surrogates" also reflects an important 1950's theme, still relevant today, of the loss of both control and identity through the existence of simulacra, as if to duplicate the self means to lose the self. The director only suggests a connection to that time and that concept with a visual allusion to the science-fiction classic, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," which also demonstrates the necessary and continuing relevance of examining the meaning and even the practice of our own humanity.

Surrogates

(PG-13), directed by Jonathan Mostow

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