The Island
Confession time: I like a few Michael Bay movies.
Not all of them, God no. You couldn’t pay me to sit through a Transformers movie marathon. But some of them. Of Bay’s 20 listed director credits at IMDB, I like three of his films: The Rock, Pain & Gain, and the subject of today’s Way Too Late review: The Island. Three movies isn’t so bad; it matches the number of M. Night Shyamalan movies I’ll voluntarily sit through. Bay is known for bombastic summer fluff: with explosions to keep the teenage boys happy and enough product placement to help out the marketing team. The Island has both of these things, but I enjoyed the movie as a dystopian science-fiction piece as well. Sometimes, Bay gets it right.
In an unspecified year in the future, the last vestiges of humanity all live in a compound. Earth is contaminated, and no one is allowed outside. The last green place on Earth, the Island, is used as the ultimate lottery prize. Everyone wants to go to the Island, including Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) and Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson). But there’s something wrong with Six Echo. He’s been having nightmares, enough to get the attention of Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean). And Merrick is right to be concerned, because Six Echo is about to find out the truth about his existence: there is no Island. Six Echo and the other “survivors” are clones, property of the rich, born and raised for their organs. Once he finds out, Six Echo must save Two Delta and the rest of the clones from the Island…and death. There’s a lot of running from place to place…as one expects from Michael Bay.
It’s a plot so familiar the producers were sued for copyright infringement, but that doesn’t make it awful, per se. Bay does a masterful job with his set pieces, from the compound home of Six Echo and Two Delta to the clever vision of a future city. Product placement is ubiquitous and noticeable, but for the most part it doesn’t distract from the action. In many ways, The Island feels similar in tone to From Dusk Till Dawn. That Tarantino film was really two movies in one: crime caper for the first 45 minutes or so, straight-up horror flick for the last half. The Island feels the same way: it’s an impressive science-fiction flick for the first hour or so that morphs into an action film halfway through, once Six Echo and Two Delta escape the compound and try to find their human counterparts. Bay misses his chance to say anything big and meaningful about the ethics of human cloning, although with all things Bay, big messages take a back seat to big action. In a more skillful director’s hands The Island could have been an important film in the science-fiction pantheon. As it is, we’re left with a box-office bomb that entertains its audience without doing much else. Compared to the films it took inspiration from, Logan’s Run, THX-1138, et al, The Island is a failure. I, however, prefer to say hey! At least it isn’t as bad as Transformers: Age of Extinction.
tl;drs
Quick summary: Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) and Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson) live an idyllic life in a compound in the near future, safe from the contaminated Earth outside. Everyone in the compound lives to go to the Island, the last uncontaminated green space on the planet. Or so they’re lead to believe. In reality, Six Echo and Two Delta are clones, raised to be harvested for their organs by their human counterparts. Now it’s up to Six Echo and Two Delta to escape the compound and expose the truth.
Too many writers? Three writers is too many, especially since two of them are Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, the bane of Star Trek fans such as myself.
Recommended if you like: Explosions. (That’s about it.)
Better than I expected? 2005 was the infancy of Michael Bay’s obsession with product placement; the ads in The Island could have been a lot worse.
Worse than I hoped? In the hands of a different director The Island would have been much more intelligent. But to paraphrase the Sean Bean meme: “One does not simply watch a Michael Bay movie for its cleverness.”
Would it work better in a different medium? It already has, since The Island is a derivative mashup of Logan’s Run, Parts: The Clonus Horror and THX-1138.
Verdict: Michael Bay may not care about making BIG STATEMENTS, but he does a pretty good job entertaining us with BIG EXPLOSIONS.
Related Reading: 2005 article about The Island and its product placement
