Jonathan Mostow is about as high functioning a hack as there is working in Hollywood today; while his three major studio pictures – Breakdown, U-571 and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines – are completely anonymous, they’re just a tad more proficient in the execution than your random Hollywood programmer. Mostow has chops, and he knows how to work an audience better than most.
So when you get around to catching Mostow’s fourth feature, The Surrogates, on DVD or cable, his ever-so-slightly above-average track record suggests that you’ll enjoy it more than, say, Blue Streak. This sci-fi flick, which just landed the freed-from-Pinkville Bruce Willis, will reunite Mostow with Terminator 3 screenwriters Michael Ferris and John Brancato, and will take place in a future where humans live in isolation and interact in the outside world through A.I. surrogates. Willis will play a police officer whose surrogate "investigates the murders of others’ surrogates". When Willis’s character is compelled to leave his home to investigate some sort of criminal activity, he uncovers a conspiracy. I hope robot armadillos are involved.
That Willis’s cop is able to leave the house to look into these shady doings indicates that the air is breathable for humans, which gets me a-wonderin’ as to why an entire society would voluntarily turn hermit (especially since sex would be a pretty onanistic affair). I’m sure Ferris and Brancato have thought this out. They’re good on forward-looking details. That’s why The Net feels like it could’ve been made yesterday.
The Surrogates will go before cameras sometime in February for Disney.