This past Friday, a new movie titled “Surrogates” hit the silver screen and I have a lot of thoughts about the movie and its concept. A huge fan of the sci-fi genre, I’ve always been intrigued with movies that explore our flaws as humans and how we try to use technology to fill the gaps. The storyline for the movie is centered on a world in a not so distant future where humans live vicariously through the bodies of their robot clones. In essence, they live, work and play via their robotic humanoid surrogates (hence the title). The villains in the movie (who will remain unknown until you see it 
tries to disrupt the virtual utopia of the surrogate world and expose the flaws of the virtual system that peoples lives were built around.
Think about this for a second… does this storyline really differ from the way that we live today. In a world filled with virtual avatars and interaction via the electron, we essentially live our lives as images of ourselves. We prefer to text over have a face to face conversation and tend to use our Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter accounts to personify ourselves.
More than anything, this movie is a warning to our society. While technology is a great tool to help us reach out to the stars and expand the potential of human thought, it can also be a tool that can enslave us. From a spiritual perspective the movie begs the question of how much do we give up as individuals just to be connected. While we definitely give up our privacy, isolation, and in some cases sanity, technology will also represent the ever thinning line between necessity and obsession.
Although I know for sure that I could never be comfortable with meshing my physical body and consciousness with a manmade machine, I’m not sure if others feel the same way (including some of my friends). As we were made in Gods image, how do we properly analyze what it means to rapidly pursue an image of our own. Does that bring us back full circle to the source or does it lead to a cascading destructive cycle? (only time will tell and from the looks of it, that time may be shorter than we think).
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Movie Trailer
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