The Island

Starring: (mostly) Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, (occasionally) Sean Bean, Djimon Hounsou, (briefly) Michael Clarke Duncan, Steve Buscemi, (surprisingly) Ethan Phillips a.k.a. Neelix from Star Trek: Voyager.
Director: Michael Bay

Briefly: It’s the year 20something-something (2019? 2027? Who cares?). Lincoln-Sex-Echo and Jordan-Two-Delta are two of the prettiest people on the planet. They all live in a pristine facility where they wear white figure-hugging jumpsuits, eat computer-monitored-and-optimized diets, work on assembly lines and go clubbing (no, really). And once a week, one of them wins a trip to The Island. The last natural land mass free from a never-explained ‘Contamination’ event.

Naturally, all’s not hunky dory for the happy couple.

And this is all fair and good. If you were forced to dress in white all day, not allowed to fall in love or for fuck’s sake eat bacon, well, there’s clearly evil shenanigans afoot.

The Island begins quite well. It’s a movie about cloning, but wisely, the writers don’t get all Michael Crichton and start explaining the scientific bits. The set designs, the way the clones are birthed, do the job of laying out the situation. Michael Bay’s breaks out his favourite moves: ultra-slo-mo shots, super-wide angles, flash editing, and a sudden jolt of action. This jolt sump-starts the movie’s heart and The Island just runs and runs and (yaaaaaawn) runs. It’s exciting but after a while, it just gets tiring as you get strung along – dragged - from one big action piece to the next. Each trying to top the one before it, and not quite succeeding.

The nice bits are in the little things:

• The side characters’ conversations: complaining bitterly about how some of them never win the lottery; their little crackpot theories as to how selection takes place; misspelling ‘Dude’ as ‘Dood.’

• How sterile their environment is: a computer tests your urine when you take a piss to decides if you should eat more bananas; if you have a bad dream, you have to go to the doctor.
  

• Brands we recognize from our time: futuristic versions of MSN, Nokia, Xbox, Puma, Lexus – scary that the blatant product placement is actually the one thing that helps improve the reality of it (“Hey, Xbox!”)

• Subtle treatment of the cloning technology: no science lesson, just camera pans showing bodies in various stages of development; all the clones talk like 15-years old, so limited is their experience of the real world

It’s this stuff, not the actors that are The Island’s texture. The actors – we’ve seen how capable they are in other shows – do nothing for the movie. It could be anyone, so I won’t go into it here. I won’t even talk about Scarlett Johansson with her almost pneumatically-perfect bosom.

It’s a lot of flash, with no real bang.
And that ending.
I won’t spoil it for you, mostly because I can’t.



Appendix:
Listen, I really wanted this one to be good. And I feel bit bad that it wasn’t so I’ll give you a list of movies you can see if you didn’t like the Island.

• Gattaca – Not cloning per se, but genetic perfection. Beautifully written, directed, hell everything.
• Bad Boys – Still Michael Bay’s best movie to my mind. Bad Boys 2, if you want to see a present day version of The Island’s highway chase scene (like a mirror!)
• Back To The Future 2 – The future, time travel, popular culture, laughs.
• Shallow Grave – The first time I saw Ewan McGregor, and the first movie Danny Boyle made. Wicked plot, and Ewan’s great in it.
• Eight Legged Freaks – Giant spiders attack town and Scarlett Johansson runs around in a top that I’d like to believe is not a special effect. Oh my.