"Surrogates," the new Bruce Willis sci-fi flick directed by Jonathan Rostow, sketches out a brave new world where the plasticky digital-airbrush aesthetic of Photoshop and Ayumi Hamasaki album covers has triumphed over the imperfections of the meat body; humans lie in "Stim-chairs" all day plugged into sensors and goggles that allow them to control their lifelike robotic avatars ("surrogates"), which — just like the ones in online games — offer both anonymity and virtual physical perfection out in the big bad world. Kind of like "Avatar" without the "smurf" tribe, actually.

With its one slender premise, "Surrogates" has no right to be anything more than an especially big-budget "Twilight Zone" episode, but it manages some scenes of unnerving power and freakiness that push it way beyond the generic: A man laughing as his face is pummeled in by an enraged husband, because he knows his face isn't real; the sexy blonde club vixen who seduces a young stud for the pleasure of her avatar controller, who turns out to be a fat, slovenly 50-something dude; a military command bunker where young gamerlike techies wage remote war using avatar soldiers on a very real battlefield somewhere across the planet. (This last bit is not far from the encroaching reality.)

The plot concerns a secret weapon that has the ability to not only deactivate avatars, but explode the heads of people who are plugged into them. This is not good, and a couple of detectives (played by Willis and Radha Mitchell) try to track down the device, only to find it has fallen into the hands of the Dread Zone, an enclave of crusty Luddites who believe, as their prophet (Ving Rhames) puts it, "We're not meant to experience the world through the machine."