The Island

Ah Michael Bay...don't you just love the guy? Anytime I start to crave absurdity and preposterous action scenes, I know I can count on him to fully deliver.

Sure enough, The Island is everything one would expect a Michael Bay film to be, although this particular movie branches out into a somewhat disturbing science fiction realm. It takes place sometime in the future, where human cloning is used for the purposes of organ replication and donation. The very rich can buy their very own "insurance policy" and be assured that if they need an organ transplant at some point in the future, their cloned parts will be available. The movie opens within the clone facility, which is obviously from the future since everything is sparkling white and basically looks like the inside of an Apple computer store. Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) is one such clone, but he's more of a Microsoft guy and therefore not so happy living in this utopian society. The clones are led to believe that the world outside suffered some huge contamination, and that they are the only surviving humans. They are also told that there is one island left on earth that is still clean and livable, and every so often there is a lottery to determine who among the population gets to go live there. Lincoln Six Echo questions everything about his existence in the facility and ultimately discovers that those who are picked to live on the island are in actuality killed (although he doesn't know why). He makes his escape with best-friend Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson), and the two of them set out to find their policy owners in the hope that the awful truth of the facility will be revealed to the world.

The remainder of the movie is less about causing the audience to think, and more about Michael Bay launching a visual assault upon the viewers. Don't get me wrong, this is all entertaining and fun to watch...but, come on. Seriously? There was one action scene that takes place on a skyscraper, and it was so completely absurd that I found myself laughing aloud. I'm fairly certain it wasn't meant to be comedic, but I also don't think that being a clone somehow makes one impervious to death and injury after free falling from over 30 stories up. Then again, perhaps the cloning process does in fact equip one with this ability. I don't know, I'm not a scientist.

Michael Bay was smart to cast Sean Bean as Dr. Merrick, because the instant I see either Sean Bean or Gary Sinise in a movie, I am assured that their characters must be up to no good. Sean Bean is thwarted in his original "vegetative state clones" design, and so evilly makes the next logical step to create an elaborate uptopia in which his clones can live. Bwa ha ha, look at me, I'm Dr. Merrick and human life is worthless to me, I am so evil. He also goes quite insane.

Anyway, the point of the movie, as always, is that human beings cannot be contained in a strictly controlled environment without starting to question things. Blah blah blah, human beings are miraculously intelligent, I get it already. The Island is not necessarily a bad movie, and I thought it was certainly entertaining for what it was. It has a good story, and as long as you are adept at suspending reality for a few hours then you will definitely like it as well.