Remember the days when the best way to see early footage of a movie you might want to see was in the music video for a soundtrack single? I think my memories of Shocker (come on, it was Wes Craven before he was really terrible) are more from the Megadeth video than the actual movie. Now tidbits of new footage from Surrogates, directed by Jonathan Mostow and starring Bruce Willis, is in a Breaking Benjamin video on MySpace. In addition, check out a featurette on the film that we didn’t run when it appeared recently, after the break.

Surrogates is a film that has remained mostly under the radar for me. I know more about the poster that seemingly knocked off an image from Worth1000.com than I do the actual film, which is an adaptation of the comic book series and graphic novel by Robert Vendetti, Brett Weldele. The plot is like this:

The year 2017 is a future in which humans live in near-total isolation, never leaving the safety and comfort of their homes, and only communicating with their fellow man through remotely-controlled robotic bodies that serve as “surrogates”, designed as better-looking versions of their human operators. Because people are safe all the time, and damage done to a surrogate is not even felt by its owner, it is a peaceful world free from fear, pain, and crime. Bruce Willis is an FBI agent who enlists the aid of his own surrogate to investigate the first murder in years, of the genius college student who invented the surrogates.

The beginning of this video is pretty mundane, but about a minute in the action begins and it starts to feel like a Jonathan Mostow film. (The trailer gives a much better sense of this, and with far better, color.) Always wondered when that guy might actually break out of the shadow of other action directors. Will this be the film? There isn’t a lot of new stuff in this video, however. More informative is the most recent featurette, originally featured on IGN but now taken down. So the TrailerAddict embed is below instead.

Thanks to /Film reader Joshua J for the tip.