Its established in the film that the weapon overloads the surrogates and that sends a deadly signal to the user. Why is it when Willis' surrogate gets zapped, his, and only his, "surg" didn't suffer any damage? Shouldn't his optics have been destroyed at the least? How would him disconnecting on the user end deter damage from being incurred upon his surrogate?
Any ideas?
That's a good point although it really points out something misleading rather than a goof. Every surrogate that has its eyes zapped received a direct blast from the weapon. When Willis is fired upon, he ducks and the wave does not directly hit him.
So it's not a goof, but the movie definitely implies that Willis' quick-thinking action of pulling off headgear is what saved his life; in reality it did nothing, and had he not unplugged he would have reacted quicker, perhaps not lost his arm, and may have solved the whole case right there. Oops.
Why is it when Willis' surrogate gets zapped, his, and only his, "surg" didn't suffer any damage?Simple! The shot pretty much missed the surrogate, but hit the helicopter pilot. Greer gets a little bit of blow-back, but rips his connection device off, before further damage can be incurred.🐭 share
This seems like a make-it-up-as-you-go comment, but I only tuned the movie in just as Willis was in the hospital after his encounter with the weapon.
It seemed in the later part of the movie that the weapon killed the operator by uploading a 'virus' that took the safety limits off the connection equipment, then overwhelmed the surrogate and fed an immense 'signal' back to the operator. That in turn finally killed the operator as well as frying the surrogate.
If that was the case, Willis's character missed part of the process, and had a chance to have little damage to his human body.
As far as the effects and the emphasis on the eyes is concerned, the signals from the eyes has been mentioned in a lot of sci-fi as the highest bandwidth required to interact with an operator, sooo, that part is pulled from previous works, and embellished.
That was what the weapon did, but the how was not really explained in detail.
BTW, I worked with computers since long enough ago that I had a hobby computer before the IBM PCs, Apple Macs, and TRS-80s existed, and I have an old BYTE Magazine with an ad for the Apple I (motherboard only, you didn't get a case, power supply, or even a keyboard/mouse with that... and it cost about a week's paycheck at that!)
This seems like a make-it-up-as-you-go comment ...LOL! This is from one who admits ...
but I only tuned the movie in just as Willis was in the hospital after his encounter with the weapon.Duh! It's a watch the movie carefully and me offering a considered reply comment.🐭
Actually, one of the movies that I suggested SURROGATES was borrowing from was titled LOOKER (Susan Dey of the Partridge Family series, and Albert Finney, plus several other recognizable actors). LOOKER used a light weapon that needed a nearly direct line of sight to the target, a live person's eye(s). The effect was to temporarily 'freeze' the target's thinking, and they would remain in place. Think "lost time".
That allowed the bad guys to zap a woman on her apartment balcony, and give her a nudge over the balcony railing to fall to her death, appearing to be a suicide.
In one car chase sequence, Finney gets zapped from looking at his pursuers in his auto's rear view mirror, and became 'conscious' with his car crashed and sitting in a city water fountain, surrounded by onlookers. However, there was a special type of sunglasses that protected the wearer from the LOOKER gun, and a smoke grenade was also able to diffuse the LOOKER light in a large area, protecting everyone in the smoke. In several cases, Finney had put his arm up over his eyes to shield them from the line of sight, and was not zapped, even though the gun had a 'flashbulb' burst of bright light when it was fired.
I would say that idea is somewhat based on the epileptic effect of a red light flashing at a particular frequency, but that is only known to work on people that are epileptics, and the severity of their seizure from flashing light is usually mild, (think the original ANDROMEDA STRAIN where the scientist searching through growth test results is put in such a state when the one he is looking at flashes "No Growth" in large red letters on the computer terminal, and he has a "lost time" event and goes back to try and find the spot where he went catatonic.)
There is much more to the plot of the movie, LOOKER, and it is worth an idle afternoon viewing. (The Antenna TV broadcast was "edited for content", but not too much was missing from the plot.)
Does that sound like your explanation? A lot? A little?
Now, in SURROGATES, there must be some sort of feedback to the user controlling the surg. That would allow them to use less force to pick up an egg, as opposed to picking up a heavy metal object. The view of the surg would also need to be provided in near real-time, or the surg would run into things, or knock things over before the user could halt its movement, (time delay in the feedback, user reactions, and control commands). If the visual sensor of the surg was overloaded, and there were no limits to the visual feedback, not just a view screen going full white, but a signal routed into the brain via a headset... fried operator. And if the limits were removed in the surg, all movement commands might go to the maximum... also at least damaged.
And as far as the visual feedback, consider the night vision devices for military pilots, including helicopter pilots. Think of the movie FIREBIRDS (Nicholas Cage and Sean Young). There is an appreciable time delay from the night vision sensor to presenting the images to the pilot, and each eye gets different information. That is very real, and one of the reasons for training mission crashes, when the pilot 'forgets' what he/she is seeing is delayed from real life, or pays too little attention to the visual of flying.
According to my list of movies, I bought a used DVD ex-rental of SURROGATES back in 2011, and have it packed in a box somewhere, but have not watched it yet.
My comments about Surrogates stand as they are and I don't think I need to add any thing else.
Yes, I've seen Looker a few times over the years since it was first released. What I've always found interesting about that film is the change in tone that occurs during its latter half. It starts ostensibly as a thriller with SF aspects and ends up being quite comical in nature. Films don't often IMO anyway, seemingly take this sort of deliberate path, well into the body of the movie.🐭
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