In the old days, Hollywood tried to make thrillers that got under your skin -- today it's more about films that get you out of your skin.
In a sign of the times, audiences are now within a wave of sci-fi films that take the concepts of "second life" -- online avatars, virtual reality and video games -- into dark corners of the digital age. "Surrogates," a new Touchstone Pictures release starring Bruce Willis that opened at No. 2 at the box office this week, bringing in an estimated $15 million, presents a society where everyone essentially stays home but can live (and, it turns out, be killed) via glamorous, computer-controlled robot versions of themselves.
"Surrogates" director Jonathan Mostow said it's no surprise that filmmakers are finding compelling material in the ghosts that live in the machine and our societal search for a human pulse amid the pixels.
"The storytellers are telling tales about things happening in society and these are the things we're all worried about. . . . I think it's all in reference to this generalized anxiety about technology and its role in our lives."
"Surrogates" comes on the heels of the blood-splattered Lionsgate film "Gamer," which featured some similar themes but with a different tilt. Instead of robots, "Gamer" presented a tech-addicted nation where flesh-and-blood gladiators (among them Gerard Butler of "300" fame) and sex slaves give up control of their own bodies to leering customers who pull the puppet strings from computers in the privacy of their own homes.
In December, director James Cameron takes the out-of-body experience off planet with "Avatar," in which lives are lost (and unexpected love is found) when humans place their consciousness inside the giant blue bodies of alien hybrids on a planet with the oh-so-revealing name of Pandora.
Those alien vistas are very different from the images presented in "Second Skin," the well-reviewed documentary from Juan Carlos Pineiro-Escoriaza released last month after months on the festival circuit. More than 50 million people now play MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), and "Second Skin" delves into what some find in the endless hours at the keyboard -- be it deep addiction, a new tribe of friends or even quirky romance.
There are other variations of plug-in tales coming.
Next year, "Tron Legacy," from Disney, takes the download-your-mind dream back to an old-school brand name, reconnecting with the 1982 film "Tron" that was perhaps too far ahead of its time with its trippy tale of a computer programmer who finds himself living in a digital world where programs resemble their "users" in the material world.
"We were predicting some major aspects of the digital age in some ways -- there was no 'second life' when we made 'Tron' and looking back I'd say we had a frontier spirit about cyberspace and technology," said Steven Lisberger, director of "Tron" and a producer on the new film.
Then there's Christopher Nolan's "Inception," with star Leonardo DiCaprio, which was recently filming in downtown Los Angeles. The plot is a closely guarded secret, but in a perception-bending trailer for the movie, an intriguing tagline states, "Your mind is the scene of the crime," suggesting that the director of "The Dark Knight" is treading beyond our physical reality.
Personal worlds
The visions are wildly different, but all of the movies speak to the slippery nature of humanity in an era where millions of people "live" an alternative existence or second life, building their own worlds in The Sims or swinging swords at strangers in World of Warcraft.
"One life isn't enough for anyone anymore," said Mark Neveldine, who co-directed "Gamer" with Brian Taylor. "Part of it is people get heavily isolated today and then they also get greedy, they want more than the life they have and what it can offer."
Taylor and Neveldine, the same tandem behind "Crank," said they wanted to make a throwback sci-fi film that is high-energy but also laced with social commentary and, like some mash-up between "Natural Born Killers" and Sims, presents lurid bombast and of-the-moment digital-life textures. Butler portrays a death-row inmate who joins a combat game called "Slayer" that promises a chance at freedom for prisoners who let their brains be rewired to make them controllable characters in a real-life blood sport. (If some of that plot sounds familiar, the directors are aware of it; they noted that that there's a fleeting homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger and "The Running Man," if viewers keep their eyes open.)
"Surrogates" has been trying to catch the eye of moviegoers with a billboard campaign of robots flashing come-hither looks. Director Mostow, whose last feature film was 2003's "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines," said the flirtation with technology has been going on for years and that modern life is at the mercy of the machines we create.
Life at arm's length
"We're all essentially addicted to our e-mail, BlackBerrys, Facebook and Twitter," Mostow said. "I'm not saying technology is evil, believe me, it's great. I'm a major techno addict, I'm a first adopter, I get everything that's new as quick as I can."
The allure of technology is a leitmotif in "Surrogates," based on the Top Shelf comic-book series by writer Robert Venditti and artist Brett Weldele, which presents a world where safety is assured because instead of leaving home, people merely dispatch a better-looking robot version of themselves to go about their daily business. That arm's-length approach to life changes, though, when murder is reintroduced to society and an FBI agent, played by Willis, finds that he will have to venture back into the real world to find the killer.
Mostow said Willis' "believability and credibility" give the detective tale a centered realism. "And you need that in stories such as this one."
The noir sensibility of "Surrogates" is far removed from the stories coming in later seasons from the directors of the two highest-grossing films in American box office history. "Titanic" director Cameron has compared his "Avatar," which stars Sam Worthington, to familiar clash-of-culture tales such as "Dances With Wolves" and "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," while "The Dark Knight" director Nolan's "Inception," due in July 2010, seems to be channeling a stylish, less-techie version of "The Matrix."
Cameron told The Times in July that his film and many like it are more about questions than answers: "Who are we? What makes us human? And what happens when we lose that?"
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