KarateParty.org - Island, The (2005)

I must confess that I have never reviewed a movie before, so if what follows is slightly unorthodox, then please accept my apologies in advance. Last week my friends and I went to see the new Michael Bay movie The Island, and while I don’t usually feel the need to share my thoughts about a movie, this movie proved to be an exception.

As an old school fan of science fiction, it was clear that while parts of this movie were clearly well written, it "borrowed" a lot from some of the more obscure classics of the genre. In the film, Ewan McGregor plays Lincoln Six Echo while Scarlet Johansson plays Jordan Two Delta (names too similar in style to the characters of THX1138 for it to be a coincidence), both of whom are the clones of wealthy people in the real world, and act as an insurance policy providing genetically matched body parts in case of accident or illness. They are not alone, but live in a large enclosure with other clones, who are kept passive by the strict rules of the enclosure, and the prospect of winning "the lottery", a one way ticket to the only part of the earth that has not been contaminated where they can live with the previous winners in a state of utopia. Once again, if you have seen Logan’s Run then you will no doubt also get a certain sense of déjà vu, as Lincoln is quick to discover that "the lottery" is a fraud (a la carousel) and that the real world awaits, if only he can escape.

Ewan sees the final cut of the movie
and is overcome with emotion.

And escape he does, taking Jordan along with him, starting what is to become an almost endless series of (often pointless) chase scenes as the hired killers that are sent after them try to contain the situation. (I will stop the comparisons now, except to say that this is basically identical to Logan’s Run, with the protagonist and the heroine breaking out of their enclosures to confront the real world-in fact, Logan 5 has almost been copied, as it is later revealed that the Echo in Lincoln stands for generation 5, Logan 5 and Lincoln 5, come on!?)

I wont spoil the ending for you (so far I haven’t really mentioned anything that you couldn’t pick up from watching the trailer), but suffice to say, they escape, some people they meet try to help them, some people try to hinder them, they confront the bad guys at the end of the film- basically fairly standard blockbuster fare.

It seemed Michael Bay felt the need to continue his trend of making films that might have been better, if only they didn’t go on so long. While not as serious an offender as Pearl Harbour, this movie is also slightly guilty, and there were really too many scenes with gunfire and explosions for me to suspend my disbelief-it was in fact during these scenes that I had time to ponder some of the more obvious plot holes, like the fact that the whole living clones thing was so hush-hush that the clones must be contained at all costs, yet everyone from the receptionist to the mechanics to the delivery guys knew all about it and yet none of them ever consider the moral implications or the money to be had from going to the press.

Michael Bay shows the pair what he
looks like with CGI breasts.

Or the scene where a clone mother gives birth to a baby, then is killed before the baby is handed over to the real life parents-you would think that if the woman was so concerned about the pain or distorted body that comes with child birth, she would at least be an easy up sale to the new skin that others grow whole clones to get, and if she isn’t, I failed to see why they couldn’t just tell the mother the baby died/was contaminated and keep her just in case her organs were needed. But this is clearly besides the point, as if you have the technology to grow clones of any age, why not just combine the DNA and grow a 3 year old-most of the dirty work or raising the child has been done by now and kids don’t have many memories before three anyway.

While the film gave me plenty of unengaged time to think these thoughts, it wasn’t this aspect of the story that I found to be most disturbing. It was the whole world and the attitudes of the people in it that that disturbed me the most, and here is why. The film is set in 2019, and from what we see, it is possible to find two people using facial recognition in a city the size of LA2019 in a matter of seconds. Yet once the mercenaries find them, and destroy many, many cars, helicopters, weird flying things that sound exactly like pod-racers, not to mention buildings, in their attempt to quietly contain the clones so that no one ever finds out that the company uses live people to grow the organs they sell. The clones actually get arrested at one point and run through the system, yet later when they turn up at Lincolns owner’s house, it appears that the police have completely forgotten that he was obviously involved in what could be described as a destructive event in excess of recent terrorist actions. But despite this oversight, the police are highly active and efficient, easily link the two to an out of state killing that happened less than a couple of hours ago then find them using the ubiquitous invasive public surveillance system, and it seems that technology has caught up with the zeal of post-patriot act America. I couldn’t help but find this a little disturbing, not because it was a theme of the movie, but precisely because it wasn’t an important theme, it was just an assumed premise- like, if we want to make a movie in the future, it is now just assumed that we will give up privacy in exchange for a veil of safety that the movie shows to be thin indeed.

Damage to the city while containing
the escaped clones, 30 million
dollars. Getting away with it by
velcroing "police" to your chest,
priceless.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie, and felt it to be generally a mainstream rehash of some of the more obscure sci-fi out there. I must admit that despite my general dislike of Michael Bay, he does do some things just right- the sound of a monkey wrench hitting a guy across the face, the little scenes where humour was interchanged with the action, but I felt that in this case, his action heavy style resulted in too much of a good thing, and many a scene could be cut to help the pacing of the movie. While the movie rehashed many of the events and themes of Logan’s Run and THX1138, what disturbed me was some of the subtlety that was lost in translation, while the heroes may triumph in the end, they do not go on to confront the society that could make a corporation so powerful that it could keep such a huge secret despite destroying a part of a city, yet have so little privacy for the individual that they are watched everywhere they go in public, and feel it futile to even attempt to challenge the status quo, despite being confronted with the gruesome truth behind the secret of everlasting life.

*** Out of *****, but a lot of my enjoyment of this film came from its comparison to others in the genre, so this should really be considered a maximal score-without this, I fear I would have been easily bored by this blockbuster, and not been as kind.

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