Surrogates, opening today, is at its most potent when it reminds us just how much having a body totally sucks. Bodies break down, they get sick, and they fall apart. No wonder that everybody would rather jack into impervious, lovely robot bodies to face the world. Of course, it all goes horribly wrong, because somebody finds a way to destroy a robot "surrogate" and kill its operator at the same time. You won't be too shocked to hear that this turns out to be the result of a huge, confusing, nonsensical conspiracy in which nothing is what it seems.

There's been a lot of body horror involving technology lately — both Robert Downey Jr. and Jason Statham have had crude batteries inserted into their chest cavities, in Iron Man and Crank 2 respectively, and there was lots of cyborg self-loathing in Terminator Salvation. But Surrogates is the first movie I can remember seeing where the real self-loathing comes as a result of removing the body from technology.

When FBI agent Tom Greer, played by Bruce Willis, first ventures out into the world in his "meat bag" body, all of the robot-avatar people stare at him with pity, when they're not just ignoring him and elbowing him aside with their super strong robo-limbs. He's like the old man surrounded by perfect young people at the end of Logan's Run. The scenes of Willis staggering around the perfect robo-world, the stench of bodily decay coming off him, are extraordinarily powerful. They've managed to make him look way older and more decripit than he really is, while his ideal robot body (which we see a lot of early in the movie) is airbrushed into looking vapidly handsome.

And just to drive the point home, Willis takes more punishment than even an action-movie hero ought to be able to handle. He rarely manages to land a punch, but he's constantly being beaten, kicked, slammed, and caught up in nasty car accidents. Super-robots throw parking meters at his head and he barely ducks in time. He gets more and more bruised and slashed up, over the course of the film.

The movie aims to tell us that Willis' weakness and vulnerability is a result of too much reliance on technology — this is what happens when you lean on something too much, and then it's yanked away from you. But actually, you could just easily see Willis' decrepitude as proof that technology is awesome, and it's a mistake ever to yank yourself away from it.

The main thing standing in the way of that interpretation is how disturbingly candy-coated the robot bodies in the movie look. Sometimes, you start getting used to seeing the airbrushed loveliness of almost everyone in the film, and then you catch sight of a real person — or you just get a weird robot crowd scene — and you're unnerved once again. The movie has some really nice visual effects and concept design, especially in those scenes where we see the ugly, Terminator-esque endoskeletons under the immaculate skins.

And the movie definitely wants you to know that excessive reliance on technology is bad and wrong — it's one of the preachiest films I've seen in ages, and it's by no means subtle. Willis' character starts out being opposed to the use of robotic "surrogates," and his conviction rapidly hardens. Meanwhile, we are lectured constantly about the evil of using robot bodies to interact instead of communing in the flesh. And the people who are pro-Surrogate are always revealed to be evil, misguided or in need of an epiphany of some sort. Some of the preachiness comes from the Prophet (Ving Rhames), the leader of the anti-surrogate and generally Luddite resistance, but a lot of it comes from various mouthpiece characters, and bits of symbolism that are labeled "SYMBOLISM" in bright flashing colors.

The surrogates, of course, are a metaphor for our own reliance on technology to interact with the world. Our iPhones, our Blackberries, our laptops, our xBox lives. We're cutting ourselves off from real humanity by using these toys instead of going out and getting a sexually transmitted disease the way God intended.

The movie's preachiness is one huge problem — and it does get awfully tiresome after an hour or so of having messages shoved in your face — but the movie's other huge problem is that it is every bit as moronic as you'd expect from a film from the writers and director of Terminator 3. I went into this film trying to have no preconceptions, and hoping that T3 was just an aberration — but no, this film is the absolute definition of an idiotic action movie. Stuff happens for no particular reason, and there's a shocking twist every 10-15 minutes that comes out of nowhere, and then goes right back there. If you tried to diagram the plot, you'd wind up drawing an evil squiggle. One great source of plot twists is the fact that you never quite know who is really operating a robot surrogate.

Oh, and characters regularly say things like, "The only way to deal with addiction is to kill the addict!"

For some reason Surrogates reminded me of I, Robot. Maybe because both movies feature James Cromwell in a similar role. And they both have technology that everybody insists is safe inevitably biting us in the asses. But most of all, both movies have absolutely gorgeous concept design, amazing visuals, some really fun action sequences — and completely braindead storytelling. I would say Surrogates is slightly better than I, Robot, if only because it packs more of a punch to the gut.

Honestly, if you don't expect the plot to make sense, and if you enjoy giggling at ridiculous and often preachy dialog, you'll probably enjoy Surrogates a whole bunch. Bruce Willis keeps getting up, no matter what they throw at him. Even after his FBI boss says he's off the case, he keeps investigating the case. He's got some backstory involving a kid who died in an accident and a wife who's never really recovered, but mostly he's a stock-standard Willis character who won't quit until he gets to the truth. And there's nothing wrong with that.

The other thing that I really liked about Surrogates is the world-building. You get lots of interesting and sometimes horrifying hints about how this world works, including glimpsing an army "peace action" where robotic troops blow the shit out of meatsacks in some third-world country. And you sort of gather that poor people are stuck with shitty robot bodies, and you witness what looks like two surrogates beating up on a prostitute at one point. There's a nice undercurrent of corruption under the perfect shiny robot-sleeved world, which is way more effective than the movie's overt attempts to harangue us.

So to sum up: dumb movie, weak nonsense plot, incredibly preachy and sledgehammery. At the same time. it's a fun action movie with some nice set pieces, and the production design and world-building are really lovely. And it's mostly worth it for Bruce Willis' craggy, saggy, excessively mortal countenance, as he stumbles in some state of grievous injury through a landscape full of way too pretty people.

In Surrogates, people stay at home all the time, and jack their brains into glamorous, super-strong robot bodies, so you don't have to risk getting hurt or let people see your bad skin. Mostow explains to us how it all works.

So explain to me how this stem chair works, how does it save people from bed sores if they sit in it all day?

If you literally were in a chair all day long, you would have to worry about things like bed sores. But in the movie, they have these fantastic chairs that are constantly stimulating your body parts so you never have to suffer from those problems.

But how do they eat and go to the bathroom?

Well you have to get up occasionally, things like that technology can't do for you. There are a couple moments in the movie where the surrogate is completely immobilized and you find out that their operator was in the bathroom or getting a snack or something. Basically your Surrogate freezes in the action of whatever it's doing, and you can go into action and go and do whatever it is you need to do — then go back online. It's no different [than] if you were in a chat room, and you got up and and had a salad in the refrigerator and then come back. Everybody who was talking to you would just see a blinking cursor for a moment.

I've seen in the trailers that you can customize your Surrogates and I believe I saw one Surrogate with eyes on the side of its head. What else can you do?

Actually that's one of the few scenes that's not in the movie anymore. We have a scene in a bar where the bartender had put eyes in the side of his head so he can be helping out one customer, yet seeing what the patrons at the other end of the bar wanted. That's actually no longer in the movie, but there are other customized Surrogates in the movie. Most people chose to have an idealized version of themselves, but some people chose to completely change their identity. Some people chose to change their gender.

You see a girl who has literally put spikes coming out of her skull — metal spikes. She's gone a bit punk with their Surrogate. And there are Surrogates who have completely changed their skin color. We don't spend a whole lot of time on that because it's not germane to the central plot of the movie. But it was an idea that we wanted to pay some lip service to.

My personal favorite things about movies in the "not so distant future" are the little things that the crew and writers come up with, the things that set it apart as the future.

We have a lot of blink-and-you-may-miss-it details like that. I made the decision, early in preproduction, to do what the graphic novel did: even though it's set in the future, he made the world look like it does today, just with Surrogates in it. I didn't want this to be a movie where the question was, "hey do you think cars are really going to look like that in the future, will they be flying around?" These are the question marks that can distract you, when you watch a movie that is set in the future. So I said, let's just make this movie in the near future, and this technology will have come a long way very quickly. So it looks like the world we live in but it's just populated with all these robots.

What was that thing in the trailer that the Surrogates were stabbing themselves with, it looked like a drug or electricity or something like that?

There's a scene in the movie with something called "the jacker," and it's at a party. There's this glass tube that's sending this blue energy. There's a party scene where Bruce's wife is home with some friends and she's a Surrogate and they are all Surrogates too. And they are engaged in this sort of communal thing... that is, sort of... it's unclear if it's a drug-like thing, is it sort of a sexual thing, is it a combination of the two? And it basically is giving these people back in their stem chairs at home a rush by applying this energy field to their Surrogates.

Well how well policed is this Surrogates program? It seems to be owned by a private company, and yet the police use them as well?

Think of it like Microsoft, where Microsoft is a private company but everyone from law enforcement to criminals use their software. This company is the leading manufacturer of Surrogate robots and it spread like wildfire...There's no formal relationship between the government and the Surrogates.

What did Bruce Willis think about the idealized version of himself?

Bruce was an active participant in all that. We explored a lot of different looks and settled on this look as the best choice. The best thing about Bruce is he's in such good shape and a good looking guy we were able to make him look younger with a variety of old fashioned techniques and some CGI. And for his real self, we were able to make him look like he had more milage on him, with a series of old fashioned film techniques, and with his own performance. As opposed to getting a guy who's 25-years-old and [trying to] make him look 50, Bruce was the perfect guy for this film.

Was it his decision to make his ideal robot self blond? That's some beautiful robot hair there.

We wanted something where you look at it and say I've never seen Bruce Willis look like that before. We wanted something to catch your attention. And that's the whole point, people don't look like themselves. And in Bruce's character's mind he'd like to look as if he was 20 years younger.

In The Surrogates, based on the acclaimed Robert Venditti graphic novels, it's the future and nobody ever leaves the house any more. Instead, people use perfect, beautiful robotic bodies to venture out in the world — until it all goes wrong, and a cop played by Willis has to go out and investigate in the flesh. We first showed you some freaktastic images of this movie's robot bodies last year, but these new stills fully confirm it: the robots will look scary and unreal, sort of like the Bionic Woman's fembots crossed with new-style Cylons.

The Surrogates comes out Sept. 25. More pics at the link. [IGN]

Here's the plot synopsis of the original graphic novel written by Robert Vendetti, which appears to be out of print:

The fusing of virtual reality and cybernetics has ushered in the era of the surrogate, a new technology that lets users interact with the world without ever leaving their homes. It's a perfect world, and it's up to Detectives Harvey Greer and Pete Ford of the Metro Police Department to keep it that way. But, to do so, they'll need to stop a techno-terrorist bent on returning society to a time when people lived their lives instead of merely experiencing them.