New Releases: The Island

Michael Bay’s latest opus feels like it started as a tidbit from his personal dream journal; an army of blissful people in sparkling white velour jogging suits, living in a giant hotel lobby-slash-videodome, and all of them genetically engineered to pass screen-tests. And sparkling bowls of green apples in every room, for some reason. If only the studios would have given him a hundred million to expand on this vision, instead of insisting on the sweep-pans and the crash-bang and the what-not.

No, the movie is not that bad as a whole. The first hour of The Island is strong enough to keep my warm thumb positioned a few micrometers above the equator. Because it makes us think about the subject matter it presents, despite how much we hate ourselves in the morning, it nudges into the back-row pew of the church of respectable sci-fi fare.

It’s no revelation to say that The Island involves cloning. Safe in the knowledge that spare organs are being cultivated for them on the sneak, America’s rich and famous (in the near future) can now count on an extra 30-odd years of dada-esque television interviews and adopting/stealing children from third-world countries. What they don’t know is that the spare organs that are being harvested apparently need exercise. If I caught the film’s interpretive jibber-jabber correctly, fully-functional humans must be created to house these farmed organs, lest they atrophy. Sounds logical, I guess.

Scarlett Johansson stars as Jordan Two Delta, a clone so squeaky-fresh that she seems to be made of some kind of sexual Tupperware. Like the other clones, she has been "educated to the level of a 15-year old," so as not to question her environment, which is filled with video games and activities to occupy the mind and hands. Her playmate in the film is Lincoln Six Echo, played by a subdued Ewan McGregor, who seeks her out on a daily basis for no other reason than that the divining rod in his mammal brain tells him to do so.

We eventually come to learn that there’s a sickly cynical plot to keep the clones in the dark about their circumstances, by telling them that they are confined to closed quarters because the outside world has been contaminated, and that by winning a lottery, they can move out to "the island," a tropical paradise spared from the fallout. Every now and then, someone wins this lottery and waves a fond hanky as they are hastily frog-marched off to paradise. Uh-huh.

Before his number is up, Lincoln Six Echo’s ‘thinking’ neurons start firing unexpectedly after a few "proximity warnings" for being in too-close contact with Jordan Two Delta (again, sounds logical). He begins asking questions of his superiors and setting off silent alarms by questioning why he can’t have bacon to eat if he wants it. It seems to be a little sloppy of the clone supervisors not to have planned more thoroughly for such outbursts, but I guess they have a lot on their minds, keeping their To Serve Man-esque holocaust scheme under wraps.

Sean Bean, (great as 006 in Goldeneye,) plays the farmer who tends to the clone garden and has to yank a weed every now and then if it gets out of hand. As you might expect, Lincoln Six Echo becomes a weed, and there’s an elaborate yanking to be done, which involves cars, boats, buildings and anything else that can be smashed and crashed with a slight CGI fuzz around the edges.

After an multi-stage action-sequence lasting about 45 minutes - I liked the train wheels and rocket-powered hover-Harleys, but how come there's never any blood? - the film ventures back into mildly interesting territory, with McGregor getting to play a double role as the rich ‘client’ and the naive, newly liberated clone.

Meanwhile, Scarlett Johansson gets to ...well, pose some more and let her hair blow in the wind. Bay regulars Michael Clarke Duncan and Steve Buscemi appear in brief snippets of the film, with the former having a particularly gruesome little role as one of the lucky lottery winners. Buscemi is a grease monkey who keeps the clone factory humming smoothly (a recurring theme in Michael Bay movies is that all technological wizardry can be traced back to some ass-scratcher with Dorito-stained fingers). Buscemi’s character comes into regular contact with clueless clones, but has no desire to tell them what lies in store.

I was moderately impressed by little details the film has to offer, like the egg room, where clones are built from the circulatory system up. There’s also a disturbing scene of a clone giving birth, and some thoughtless prognostications by those in the know that what happens to clones doesn’t matter because they have no "souls." I bet this is close to what you would actually hear from the talking heads if clone farms like these were one day discovered to be real.

The Island has one presiding theme - that people will do anything to survive - but cleverly intuits this as a two-sided coin. It’s not just the poor, hunted clone who will follow this creed, but also the fabulously rich human being as well. We're all in the same fix, after all. I predict that we in the real world will have to face these kinds of issues at about the same point in the future when they figure out how to make CGI effects look realistic.

I won’t give away the ending of the movie, but let me say that it’s completely crazy; you’re telling me that the government that paid for these events to happen is going to allow this ending to occur without a fight? It seems impossible. I was also unconvinced by the weird arc of the Djimon Hounsou character; and flat out mystified by his bizarre placement at the film’s conclusion. There’s a lot in the film that’s mystifying, if you really think about it, so maybe it’s best not to do that.