E-prepping for an interview with Radha Mitchell later in the week, I twice zapped through the trailer for this fall’s Surrogates, Jonathan Mostow’s forthcoming film in which Mitchell co-stars opposite Bruce Willis, Bruce Willis’ hilarious hairpiece, Ving Rhames and Rosamund Pike. A futuristic thriller/murder mystery that sounds equal parts Total Recall, I, Robot and Minority Report, it features some intriguing looking grand-scale mayhem (I guess Mostow’s destruction of vast swatches of city streets in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was good for something after all), as well as a bad-ass collective outdoors collapse of a bunch of folks. But trailers for The Happening had a shot like that, too, didn’t they? Errr… nevermind.

There seems to be one fundamental flaw, however, to the movie’s premise — or at least something unaddressed in the trailer: if people were living almost exclusively through surrogates, wouldn’t society deteriorate into a carnival of excess, resembling nothing so much as a (further) engorged Bret Easton Ellis novel, instead of there not being any murders for 10 or 15 years? Right, I get that the killing, sexual acting out and other crime wouldn’t initially be inflicted on the actual human host bodies, but attendant property damage and the like would all be rampant, no? And wouldn’t that eventually spill over, revenge-style, into private residences? Just trying to peg where human nature fits into all of this.