This flick is based on the graphic novel of the same name, from which the flick departs almost completely within roughly the first 5-10 minutes.
In fact, it seemed as if the guys who wrote the screenplay had contempt for the original source material as they basically changed the entire story. In the comic, the main character is named
Harvey Greer, but for the flick they changed it to
Tom Greer.
Harvey/Tom's partner in the comic is male, while in the flick his partner is a big-breasted female
, not to mention that they're both just city detectives and not FBI.
In the comic, users are not killed when their surrogate (aka, surrie) is destroyed, and are usually more annoyed at having to replace the unit than anything else. Harvey easily sloughs his surrie and never takes on a replacement unit, while Tom is completely disoriented and fearful of being out of the house in his own body. The fat guy that runs the VSI central system isn't even in the comic and is a lame fabrication of the screenwriters.
The Prophet in the comic is an actual person against surrogacy, and not a surrie controlled by Lionel Canter, the creator of the Surrogate technology for VSI and who's become disillusioned by his invention because it has taken the life of his son. In the comic, Canter is an altruist through-and-through originally creating the surries for the severely handicapped to lead a normal life, but becomes disgusted with the way humanity has just used it to disconnect themselves from each other. The comic never mentions a son, but has Canter getting upset over kids using surries to beat and kill a homeless man, a precedent which Canter cannot abide by as he attempts to tank VSI's roll-out of surries for children. But in filmland, we can't have a character getting upset over something so trivial, so we have to make his son the victim to give him 'motivation'.
Ultimately, the end of this movie is a total mess that I won't get into, but suffice to say it's as cheesy a Hollywood end as they could've squeezed out of a graphic novel that they didn't bother reading.
But then there's the surries in the movie. Willis' surrie is, of course, Willis with heavy cake make-up and a blonde toupee. He walk very stiffly and tries not to move anything but his mouth to give the appearance of a moving mannequin.
But I think they missed an excellent special effects opportunity here. They could've used the same kind of CGI life-like recreation done in flicks like
Beowulf to make the surries better walk the line between real and synthetic. The limitation of being able to slightly tell apart real and CGI humans might actually have been a boon here.
Honestly, tho, just skip this one...
