As technology continues to rapidly change at a sometimes-alarming pace, the days of a consumer society entirely dependent on machines or robots of some kind seems as though it could very well be just right around the corner. Hollywood seems to agree as Surrogates, yet another man-versus-machine flick, is released. Instead of the same typical story of machines becoming self aware and turning against their weaker creators, though, Surrogates explores the realm of what happens when the humans operating the machines actually turn upon themselves.

The film opens with a brief evolution of how society came to know and use surrogates as part of every day life. Originally designed to help handicapped people experience the world as if they were free of disability, surrogates are completely robotic machines that appear fully human and provide a direct link to the human brain, allowing their host to fully experience whatever their "surry" is participating in. Since there was no loss or numbness of feeling for people who used surrogates, they quickly became appealing to the average person as they provided a way to see and experience the world without risk or danger. People no longer had to leave their house or even the comfort of their own bed to do anything anymore. All they needed to do was sit back, relax, plug in, and let their surry take over.

As to be expected, surrogates quickly revolutionized the way the world operated. Surrogates were sent out in place of physical human beings more and more until real people rarely left their homes anymore. The outside world was full of machines that accomplished everything for their hosts who stayed safely at home. Immediately crime rates rapidly decreased as no harm was physically coming to anyone anymore. Problems that had plagued society for centuries, such as racism and discrimination, virtually disappeared overnight. As surrogate use continued to grow more and more, VSI, the corporation who originally introduced surrogates, grew to be the largest corporation in a world that was everyday becoming more and more perfectly robotic. Thanks to human invention, society seemed to be on the brink of a perfectly peaceful existence.

Human perfection, however, would soon discover its limits. Although ninety-nine percent of the world eagerly turned to surrogate use, there were still those who viewed surrogates as evil and bad. As surrogate use continued to prevail for the majority of people, those who chose not to plug in were pushed further and further away and put into "reservations." The reservations were cities within cities full of inhabitants who followed the voice of "The Prophet," who taught that the machines were a lie sold to the people and that revolution against the machines is inevitably coming.

Tensions begin to grow even more intense when two surrogates are attacked, resulting in not only frying the surrogate bodies but also actually killing their hosts in the first homicide since before many can even recall. As FBI agents Greer and Peters investigate the case they discover that the notion that surrogates provide a safe and secure way to experience the world may not necessarily be true, which begins to shake the very foundation that surrogate use was originally built upon. Greer already has uncertainties about his life with his surrogate and his wife's surrogate and sometimes longs for the days when he felt as a real human feels. As he uncovers more facts about the case, he finds more and more about how much danger the world of people who use surrogates is unknowingly in, and he discovers the existence of something that has the potential to send the entire world, robotic and otherwise, crashing down upon the perfect society they have been working so hard to build.

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