Funniest thing is, the news anchors look exactly the same.

I first encountered “Surrogates” when one of the curvy blondes hired to melt the intergalactic young brains at New York Comic Con handed me a black postcard featuring an evenly tanned, non-bald Bruce Willis. Bruce also appeared to have a metal neck. Hm. I turned it over, read the marketing copy, and immediately decided that this movie was about Facebook. Yeah, that  Facebook.

Then the preview began to show, and the posters of pulchritudinous people with titanium endoskeletons started to pop up in subway stations. And I would point to them and turn to whomever I was with and casually say, “Oh that’s that movie about Facebook.” Most of them assumed I was joking or were just plain confused. By all appearances, this was an action movie, not a montage of Jesus-fish wall graffiti and What Lawn Ornament Are You? results. (Flamingo, if you were curious.)

Having now seen it, I hold my ground: this movie is about Facebook. (OK, and Twitter and Second Life and WoW, etc.)

The concept itself, however, I’d come across in The Time Before Facebook, in David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest, which I had been reading just as Facebook was trickling its way to the Midwest. The book housed about 10 pages devoted to the hypothetical rise and fall of the hypothetical video-phone. There’s a great little synopsis at conversationalreading.com, which I’ll copy here:

Basically it works like this: First consumers flock to the technology. However, they soon notice the drawback — now the person you are talking to on the phone can see you…[C]onsumers develop horrible complexes about appearing ugly on their video phones. Soon new technology enables users to “upgrade” their appearance, and this idea runs away until eventually there is an entire industry built around providing fake appearances to hardwire into video-phones. At this point people realize that for all intents and purposes they’re right back where they started, voice-only phone communication, and the bottom drops out of the video-phone market.

Apparently, Mr. Wallace saw it when he wrote this way back in 1994–that technology was allowing people to carefully manipulate and craft their outward appearances. He saw how easy it was for the Marketing Gods to pray on our vanities.

These days, Facebook is the ultimate tool for persona-honing. We can choose our most flattering picture. We can fake our interest in soccer. We can de-tag that one photo where our arms make us look kinda gay. We can elicit desired reactions from peers with carefully vague status updates. Moreover, we can present ourselves how we want to be seen, and almost believe that it’s true. And that’s what “Surrogates” is all about, underneath the action.

I should probably talk about the movie now.

It is not the future; it is an alternate history, and it’s now. Technology has evolved that lets us sit in a chair all day and control our better-lookin’ mechanical selves, remotely enjoying all the senses (except maybe taste?) that we’d enjoy if we were using our actual bodies. Your “surry” can look however you’d like it to look. Most people have chosen to look like Mario Lopez. I guess flawless and vacant is in. Murder rates have plummeted to almost non-existent. War has essentially become a game of multiplayer Halo. And they didn’t mention it, but I’m assuming STDs are also on the decline?

There’s also a small Ving-Rhames-helmed percentage of the population that has resisted. They live in a roped-off section of town called “The Human Quarter” or something nauseatingly cornball like that. They’re hairy and poor and they’re ugly and they don’t get invited to shit these days. But they insist that surrogacy is evil and they wave sticks around and promise Revolution. Psshh. Yeah right, Humans. What match are you for human-controlled robots?

Well, now something strange is going on. The humans might have a weapon of some kind. A very dangerous one. For the first time in many years, the police have a 187 on their hands. Somehow, some rogue human zapped a surrogate with some Star Trekish contraption, overloading its circuits and killing its controller. (In Facebook terms, this would be like someone spamming your wall until you die, bleeding from the eyes.) And that person who died just happens to be the son of the inventor of surrogate technology, Mark Zuckerberg Emilio Canter. (They didn’t actually give him a first name on IMDB, so I’m just going to call him “Emilio.”)

So Bruce Willis gets put on the case: Where did this weapon come from? And how do the “Meat Bags” have it, when it’s way too advanced for them? I mean, they’re just silly humans!

Just as he’s digging in, though, Bruce becomes involved in a dangerous chase. In the process, his surrogate is destroyed by the population of the Human Quarter and he’s nearly killed by the zapper thing. Hospitalized, he’s forced to drop the case. But c’mon. It’s fucking Bruce Willis. He’s not giving up that easy. I mean, haven’t they seen the Die Hards?

In the course of all this, though, he is becoming increasingly conflicted about his own surry. He hasn’t seen his beloved wife in forever. Just her goddamn robot. His son died years ago in a car accident, and this is how his wife is dealing with it. She hides behind her veneer. He thinks that she shouldn’t though. You can read it in his eyes when he wanders into his son’s old room and caresses his little baseball glove. Then he just goes all Zach Morris on her later, as they argue in her workplace: “Baby, I want you. This isn’t you. Come back to me.” But she’s all like “This is better.” and just “unplugs” mid-conversation. (Which makes for intriguing possibilities in connubial exit behavior. Because, really, what do you do? Continue to talk to this powered-down hot robot?)

You can probably see where this is all headed. Leather jacket comes out. Bruce Willis goes vigilante. Zuckerberg goes batshit. There’s a Revolution. There’s a Conspiracy. A Personal Epiphany. A Ticking Clock. A Decision. A Dramatic Climax, and then—what’s that I hear? Laughter? From everyone in the theater? Whoops, I don’t…uh…I don’t think that was supposed to be funny.

But it kinda was.

“Surrogates” takes itself way too seriously. It wants to be an allegory with guns like “The Matrix” was an allegory with guns. There are even what could be construed as nods to “The Matrix”—the style of running in the chase scenes, the leather jacket on the “free” character vs. the suits on the surrogates, the bolt-belching ray gun, the angle of recline in the sim chairs—but the coherence of the film’s world couldn’t approach the level of “The Matrix.” There were too many questions, too many improbabilities, and thus the alternate universe appeared thrown together. When that happens, “dramatic” becomes “ridiculous.”

The movie’s ambitions are laudable. It’s helping to get across an important message about remembering who we are (not Mario Lopez) and the necessity for real human connection, but it could’ve maybe done without the tired end-of-the-world framework. Perhaps a more even-handed, cerebral approach should be employed when implying that we’d be better off without our online communities. But then probably no one would’ve seen it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go post this review and wait for people to tell me they care.

“Gigantic” needs to get a life

One look at the poster for “Gigantic” and you know what  it’s trying to be. There are tall, lank-haired Paul Dano and ostensibly pantsless Zooey Deschanel standing in a starkly furnished, sunlit apartment, staring off somewhere behind the camera, looking slightly uncomfortable.

This hipster-genius writer/director is going to show me his revolutionary vision of the nature of urban relationships through an idiosyncratic story of gangly Brooklyn twenty-somethings! And look: a solid cast. Another “Squid and the Whale” perhaps?

Nope. It’s just overwrought garbage.

Brian Weatherby (Dano) wants to adopt a Chinese baby. It has been his dream since childhood. (Fair enough.) He’s now 28, unmarried, and working on a sales floor for extremely high-end Swedish mattresses. Not the best candidate for an adoptive parent, but he’s persistent. One day, some big rich jackass (John Goodman) with a very tolerant gay assistant saunters in to buy a mattress, but leaves the actual purchasing to his daughter, Happy (Deschanel). Happy falls asleep on one of the beds when she comes to make payment, and Brian very sweetly covers her with a blanket. Later, when Brian delivers the mattress, they have sex in her papa’s fancy car. They’re smitten until Brian actually gets his adoption passed and Happy, predictably, freaks out and makes for the door.

That’s the plot. It’s not a good one, but it’s salvageable. Apparently, though, the writer didn’t think it would be enough. Soon after the opening credits, Brian is attacked by a bearded homeless guy who gives him a black eye. The same guy later appears, firing a gun at him in the woods while he’s with his father and brothers, and then appears again later, when Brian finally kills him with a sharp object and mutters an incongruous aside: “This has been going on for longer than you’d think.”

Conceded: this could easily be one of those “Dave didn’t get the hidden symbolic meaning” things. But there’s something to be said for coherence and subtlety. The flighty, lo-fi mood of this movie had no place for some unexplained quasi-Lynchian subplot ending in a dumpster-side murder. I don’t care what he’s trying to say. He needs to put a leash on his ego and say it another way.

I would see it again to try to understand it if the film weren’t so boring. A few John Goodman one-liners aside, the jokes were flat and the dialogue was forced and overwritten. One of the most entertaining parts of the film was watching Zooey Deschanel teeter all over the set in her high heels. We never learn much about her character other than that she’s capricious. Nor do we learn much about any of the other one-adjective characters. Give me another layer, Mr. Director. Or at least some nudity from closer than 30 meters. Entertain me or make your point. I’m not even asking for both.

Loser, Loser, Movie Chooser.

The folks behind “21” were dealt a great hand. The idea of six MIT students burning Vegas for millions is compelling enough—some “Good Will Hunting” meets “Ocean’s Eleven” sort of appeal. And then add to that that it’s based on a true story, and you’ve got yourself a movie pitch—and a lot of promising fodder.

Unfortunately, they’ve screwed it up. All they had to do was retell, with a little style, an already-fascinating true story. But, no. They farted out some kind of gaudy miasma of bright lights and MTV transitions. You know those girls who take their cell phones and glue little plastic jewels to their entire surfaces? I believe the technical verb for that is “Bedazzle®.” Well, this is a Bedazzled® “Rounders.” I loved “Rounders.” There was no need to cover it with tiny plastic jewels.

(It just occurred to me that every movie I’ve referenced so far has Matt Damon in it. I’m going to see if I can keep that up.)

As far as the story goes, though: Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess, “Across the Universe”) is wicked smart. But all he ever does is study, and, to get his scholarship to Harvard Med, he needs something to make himself stand out among all the other near-perfect candidates. A “life experience,” they call it. He’d like to find one. But, strangely enough, one finds him when he’s confronted by Professor Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey) and his posse of gifted MIT students who spend their weekends at the Vegas blackjack tables, counting cards and making un-college amounts of money. After Ben’s finally convinced to fall in league with them, he quickly becomes the prodigy of the outfit, usurping the former “big player,” Fisher (Jacob Pitts, “Eurotrip”) and setting off the initial drama. And so begins your typical tragicomic sine wave. Rise-fall-rise, El fin.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with the story’s arc. It’s real, after all. But when the director throws in 600 jump cuts and hires a Foley artist with Ecstasy problems, no one can pay attention to the story. I can understand that maybe the effects were utilized in order to communicate a certain surrealism associated with Vegas and Money, but they are used to such an extent that they become distracting and even irritating. Consequently, the audience, in self-defense, recedes into the safety of blank stares and daydreams. Personally, I found myself wishing Jacob Pitts would begin spouting his sex-crazed lines from “Eurotrip” (featuring Matt Damon!) and wondering where in God’s name I’d seen Miles (Josh Gad) before.

Had the writing been better, the movie may have been salvageable. Unfortunately, though, the jokes fall flat and the romantic chemistry between the two “involved” stars fizzles itself into mere vapors. One can’t blame the acting. Even Mr. Spacey, could make nothing from the material. I had been wondering why they’d decided to put the “stop calling me ‘dude’” line in the preview, but I understand now that it’s, sadly, one of the funniest lines in the movie.

Maybe, in ten years, Hollywood can recycle this story and make a quality flick out of it. Maybe they can hire some sharper writers and a mature director to make it. Maybe they can nix the jump cuts and the clumsy voiceover and the mind-numbing repetition of the profound “Winner, winner, chicken dinner.” But, until then, the table’s cold.