Ranpitsu

What pictures like Surrogates show is that there’s no substitute for a compelling story. Much of the awkwardly-titled Surrogates’ marketing time was devoted to establishing the context and setting of its near future world where humans live their lives through robot surrogates, from a trailer that started as a commercial (a la ads for The Island and others) to billboards of models with parts of their robotic skeletons exposed. However, relatively little time was devoted to the story, characters and action, which were left vague and nondescript. Given the volume of other like-minded movies, the robot or avatar premise alone does not possess the wow factor with audiences, and, lacking a clear connection to the real world, served only to disconnect Surrogates from moviegoers.

While the Ice Age franchise’s migration from spring to a more competitive summer might be bandied about as a reason for Dawn of the Dinosaurs’ relatively more glacial reception, the picture suffered from looking like more of the same in its marketing campaign. No compelling reason was presented to make it as big a theatrical event as The Meltdown, and the proceedings may have been confounded by the anachronistic inclusion of dinosaurs, which were seemingly intended as a shortcut to audience expansion.