Coming back to New Zealand from holiday, one of the inflight movies was “Surrogates”, a film starring Bruce Willis about a future society where people live out their lives through robotic “surrogates” while not leaving home. These surrogates remove the risk of injury or death by going outside of home.

Without giving too much of the plot away, Willis’ character Tom Greer (or initially Greer’s surrogate robot) is an FBI agent investigating a high-profile murder.

Along the way his surrogate is destroyed and won’t be replaced, so Greer must leave his apartment himself and venture out into the world in person, an action seen as dangerous and unnecessary – why would anyone go out in person anymore?

I couldn’t help drawing a similarity to how many see travelling anywhere – why walk anywhere (or use any other means) when you can drive your car?

During the course of the movie, we got to see some of the characters’ real selves. While the surrogates were all good looking and well shaped, the real people were looking really unhealthy – overweight, pale, and weak from never going outside their homes anymore.

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