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Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson are on the run in The Island.
In many respects, it is difficult to dislike The Island. It is so aggressively, unabashedly a Michael Bay film: loud and furiously paced, with a truly staggering chase-sequence-to-running-time ratio. It is also, however, a little too slick, too sleekly vacuous, with all the action piled on top of a movie that could have been exponentially better. It’s uneven and flawed, but quite entertaining almost despite itself.
After an opening dream sequence that is trippy and hectic and, unexpectedly, one of the better first five minutes of a movie I’ve seen in a long while, The Island jumps right into all of the standard tropes of futuristic sci-fi dystopia. The population lives a regimented, highly surveiled, stark white existence. Homogeneity and unquestioning obedience are the name of the game, as they so often are in these future societies. Also big is blatant, pervasive product placement (A comment on the inevitable future to consumer consumption or evidence of movie greed? You be the judge). These are the survivors of some global contamination, and they all live for the lottery, when a lucky few are chosen to go to the island, a pristine tropical paradise that is the last non-toxic spot of nature.
Or rather, that is the convenient story concocted for these believing souls. In reality, there is no island, and these “survivors” are clones, glorified insurance policies purchased and created for rich folk who want genetically identical organs to harvest, should the need arise or vanity demand it. When people are chosen in the lottery, it’s more the Shirley Jackson version than the MegaMillions one.
The well-oiled machine of the clone factory is threatened when one of the products, Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor), starts having prophetic dreams and gets a little too curious about the state of the world. And when his girl crush, Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson), gets selected to head off to the island, he decides it’s time for them to make a run for it. They get help from one of the compound’s employees (Steve Buscemi), and run some more. Sean Bean plays the mastermind/head-doctor-with-a-God-complex of the clinic who sends a ruthless mercenary (Djimon Hounsou) out after them, so they continue to run. Lincoln and Jordan are looking for their originals, the people of whom they are clones, but that is really just a convenient plot excuse for them to run. Again. Still.
The chase sequences are loud, elaborate and, yes, impressively enjoyable; they are also staggering in their sheer number. And thus is the problem with The Island: at its heart, it’s really just another run-chase-run movie. This is not an inherent flaw; if mindless, violent races against the odds have their place anywhere, it’s in the summer blockbuster. And if anyone can make them more entertaining than they are repetitive, it’s Michael Bay. But even though The Island is a pretty fun ride, it’s a very uneven one.
The (few) scenes of calm and plot here operate as mere placeholders and set up for the next spectacular action sequence, when frankly they could be far more rich. When Lincoln the product meets Lincoln the original, it’s honestly funny, in a surreal and awkward way. Similar the question of mortality and control, and how much weight it has in this era of hullabaloo about cloning and stem cells and the like. It has all the beginnings of something cool and compelling.
But in Bay’s hands, all the potential is wasted. It feels as though he was handed a film that was already written and cast, and did with it what he knew how: made it as much like Armageddon as possible, while burdened with highly capable actors and a decent script (by Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci who, as writers on TV’s Alias, know something about mixing the cerebral with the big chases). Were the cast less capable or compelling, The Island would be more comprehensible, pegged as a basic numbing, pounding actioner.
This is in no way to rally for a different cast, because without the array of better-than-the-material leads, The Island would undoubtedly have been painfully unwatchable — there were many moments where it was a great movie, because it let McGregor loose to simply have fun, and was therefore quite fun to watch. No, if we’re looking to change personnel on The Island, Bay would be the place to start. Replace him with a more thinking-man type of helmer, and we’d still have an action movie, but one with a brain to go with its pounding pulse.
Instead, The Island is glossy, energetic and decently entertaining, despite being over-produced, uneven and vaguely guilt-inducing. Given current low-riding box office receipts though, The Island ought to have no trouble soaring through the summer season with respectable grosses and reasonably satisfied product-sponsored audiences
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