Don't worry, this'll only hurt for about 88 minutes

If you’re dying to know what it might be like to see a movie made entirely by robots you could do worse than Surrogates. This new Disney product is top to bottom a sleek, smooth and fully deodorized work, completely devoid of such pesky eccentricities as can occasionally spontaneously pop out of the human imagination. There’s an early scene where a boy FBI robot (a wigged and air-brushed Bruce Willis) and a girl FBI robot (Radha Mitchell, looking rather like Rebecca De Mornay) question a robot while another robot looks on. It’s like an interrogation scene played out between cucumbers, except not so lively. Or funny. Once an actual human or two enters the picture, with Willis receiving his requisite ass kicking quickly enough, things only get slightly more animated.


Surrogates is based on a comic book and adapted for the screen by Michael Ferris and John Brancato, both of whom worked on the last couple of Terminator flicks, which surprisingly weren’t enough to dissuade anyone to keep these guys away from more robot movies. Artificial intelligence is a subject that in theory lends itself to any number of provocative, thoughtful stories, yet it so rarely yields anything above a dim-witted extrapolation of Frankenstein or Blade Runner. In imagining a near future where everyone stays home and has their robot surrogate—usually a younger, blander version of themselves—go out and do everything for them, Ferris and Brancato, in league with T3 director Jonathan Mostow, convey a truly astonishing lack of interest in their scenario’s consequences. And if we can agree that science fiction requires a modicum of plausibility to counterbalance the fantastical, these boys are barely showing up to work. The opening flurry of boilerplate newscast exposition informs us that 98% of the global population is using surrogates. That’s right, Tibetan monks, Bangladeshi disaster victims, underpaid Peruvian coffee growers, homeless guys living under bridges, nomadic Kazakh goat herders subsisting without electricity or running water—all of them are plugged in, kicking back and having their robot doubles plow the fields, get laid, breakdance, and take out the trash. This is when ignorance becomes offensive. I don’t think 98% of the world’s population even owns a fucking radio.

Man, I wish I were in La Jetée, or at least 12 Monkeys.

Maybe a tanning bed.

The story as such concerns an investigation into a murder enacted with a secret zap gun that fries a surrogate’s insides so fast that I guess it somehow gives the same jolt to its human counterpart. Or something. Anyway the victim’s the son of the original surrogate inventor (James Cromwell), who now holes up in his mansion and is clearly up to no good. Bruce decides to rough it and try first-hand experience again after his surrogate is blown to bits following a chopper crash into the inner-city fortress of a band of anti-surrogate insurgents, all of whom, for some reason, are unpleasant, overweight, unshaven, and dress like pissed-off hillbillies. They’re led by Ving Rhames, dolled-up like a Rastafarian mystic, but there’s something fishy about him, too. So we sit patiently and wait for all the drearily predictable plot twists to play out, building to a climax that offers the one genuinely nifty sequence in the whole movie, with dozens upon dozes of life-size Kens and Barbies collapsing in the streets like they’re reenacting that Radiohead video where they guy can’t get up. Think how much better the movie could have been had it started there.

Mr Universe Goes to Hollywood: on playing robots and barbarians, pumping iron, and the strange case of the movies' most fantastic actor

Is there a case to be made for Arnold Schwarzenegger being heralded a great—or should we say “fantastic”—actor? The hulking, hyperconfident, business-savvy Austrian bodybuilder who so dazzled Hollywood during his ascension into the realm of Californian politics is so resolutely larger than life, bordering on extraterrestrial, so ill-fitting in the role of a mere mortal, only a fool could take up the enterprise of claiming the man could embody all that broad a range of human experience. But there came a time when the movies genuinely needed him, and he answered their call, filling a niche that’s absolutely singular.

Bob Raffelson surely felt he’d struck gold when Schwarzenegger was brilliantly cast in Stay Hungry (1976), but the fledging actor was to take an altogether different, more ostentatious path into stardom, with his prominent role in Pumping Iron (77) making a more definitive debut, even while showing him to be obnoxious. Who else could possibly become the Nietzschean brute in Conan the Barbarian (82)? There’s not a single action hero from whatever athletic or aesthetic discipline, neither a Jean-Claude nor a Dolph, who exudes the same outsized will, the same steely focus, the same base satisfaction and irony-free, near-palpable, unabashed narcissism. In his spooky, unwaveringly Republican appraisal of what is good in life (“to crush your enemies, to see them kneeling before you, and to hear the lamentations of the women”), in his supple swinging of heavy weaponry, in his decidedly arrogant prayers to Crom, Schwarzenegger’s is that treasured thing, a performance of total conviction, crude heroism manifested through sheer, improbably body mass and a 1000-mile stare.

I’d argue Conan remains his career peak, but you could just as easily argue that Schwarzenegger was never more at home in any role as he was playing the killer robot from the future, a role fully utilizing Schwarzenegger’s unusual talent for physical concision and control. The Terminator (84) and The Terminator 2: Judgment Day (91) showcase one of the strangest movie icons to come around since Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein’s monster, a model no doubt for Schwarzenegger’s “good” terminator of the second film, a psychologically primitive techno-beast of man’s creation capable of becoming more human through the untainted intentions of an admiring child wonderfully played by Edward Furlong.

This second terminator was by far the more complex character, through T2 was ultimately so wearyingly excessive in every respect—especially duration—that it’s the original film that, for all its technically less advanced effects and pageant of big hair, has aged better and holds more charm. It’s a fiercer, leaner, more impactful story still imbued with writer/director James Cameron’s contagious sense of child-like awe over the time-slipping, apocalyptic scope of his one killer sci-fi idea. Still, even in that first time out there was still too much of at least two things: dull flash-forwards to the dreary future better imagined by the audience, and the even duller performance from Michael Biehn, whose heavy emoting feels all the more ham-fisted next to Schwarzenegger’s terrifying placidity. 

Acting for the movies can be as much about presence as it is about chops, and even if he never makes another movie half as thrilling as those he made in his salad days, Schwarzenegger has struck film history with a presence truly like no other. For better or for worse, he will no doubt do the same for US politics.