T H E    I S L A N D

Return to the Main Page

Summary:
It's the future, and the world has been contaminated with a killer virus. Everyone lives in a huge building, and a lottery allows people to go to The Island... the sole remaining place of tranquility left on earth 'Up Above'.  But actually, everyone are clones, and the lottery winners are the replacement parts for rich folk in the real world.  Lincoln Six Echo realizes this, and tries not to die.

Review:
Well, what would I expect from Michael Bay?  Very little.  I've hated pretty much everything he's done.  The only movie I actually enjoyed by him was his first one, Bad Boys, and that was just watchable fluff.  I would have enjoyed The Rock if I didn't get a damned headache from the endless quickcuts.  It's like the guy doesn't know how to get out of the editing room long enough to keep the audience from feeling like they're on the edge of suffering epileptic seizures.  He's like a 6 year old boy with a bad case of ADD.  I saw The Island simply because nothing else great was coming out this week.
I'm surprised, actually.  I liked this flick.  It's not going to change your life, but it was entertaining enough, and although it's kind of stupid, at least it took its' time VISUALLY enough for me to comprehend most of what was going on.  It's got the more simplistic elements of Blade Runner (imprinted memories), Logan's Run (the running parts), Return of the Jedi (speeder bike chase), Robocop (the police cars), and your typical sci-fi clone/Utopian/post-apocalyptic scenarios. Ewan McGregor's always a solid choice for carrying a film, and Johansson was decent enough. I'm a fan of Steve Buscemi, and he's usually the same in every role, but he's amusing so it's alright.  Michael Clark Duncan is in this movie for about 8 minutes, so he's virtually not worth mentioning.  Sean Bean is just your typical bad guy, while Djimon Hounsou always has a cool presence, and I liked watching him in this movie as well.

There's one scene that kicked Uber ass in Bad Boys 2, and that was the car chase.  I say rent that movie for those 15 minutes alone. Absolutely amazing.  There are two major vehicle chase sequences in The Island as well, but not quite as entertaining.  The scene where McGregor climbs onto a flying motorcycle is so similar in sound and action to the speeder bike chase scene in Return of the Jedi that I actually laughed out loud.  The rest of the action is just like any other of Michael Bay's forays, but I'm thankful that he laid back a bit in the unending 3 second camera shots, and allowed a little more breathing time between camera changes every once in a while.  You can take any action scene from any of his movies, and intersplice them into another movie and you'll have the same results.  They're very generic, but who cares as long as it's cool, right?! Plenty of shit blows up, there are tons of moments where you say, "oh yeah RIIIIGHT!!" and you have to suspend your disbelief while trying to relish in the neat effects and NOT try to let your logic get in the way.
Bay goes way overboard on the redundant slow motion, with an endless supply of panning circular shots, slow motion running, and melodramatic 'hero shots' of spinning heads, flying hair and guns being spun around towards something just off-camera. Whatever, man. I especially got a chuckle near the end, when Johansson is under a white sheet, and then the slow motion kicks in once again as her hand flies out from under the sheet, and she's got a gun in her hand, and she looks all action-heroinne-ish as she starts to fire. Oh my Gawd, this shit gets old fast.

The soundtrack was also pretty funny. During the more 'dramatic' scenes, a synthetic chorus kicks in, screaming "this is Serenity. Peacefulness and calm shall overcome you."  Three seconds later, a generic drumbeat and electronic music kicks in, supposedly trying to pump you up.  The transition from one tone to another switches so quickly, that once again I started laughing when I wasn't supposed to.  
Another extremely annoying element to this flick was the endless product placements. Xbox, Aquafina, Puma, as well as other products all make no sense during the movie, since EVERYTHING ELSE has no label, and the world these people are living in requires no advertisements, and so all it does is annoy the hell out of me when these product placements are thrown in for no reason whatsoever but to get money by these companies to have their product shown onscreen. There's a virtual videogame fight scene that was Xbox'd out, and not only that, it has NO RELEVENCE TO THE REST OF THE MOVIE AT ALL. This really sucked, because later on in the movie you'd think these two characters would be able to fight better than they do seeing as how they can do spin kicks and flips for a full-motion captured video game. Whatever, fuck you! That's all I have to say about that!

There's very little philosophy about the morality of cloning, would clones have a soul - or many other interesting theories that could have been brought forth in The Island, but one must not forget that this is Michael Bay, and it's a summer action movie before anything else.  You're not going to walk out of this movie pondering the meaning of an origami unicorn, or discuss with your friend the deeper implications of the evolution of science, and if playing God will lead to the end of our race as we know it.  No, the main point of this movie is to make you have fun. To be entertained.  For the most part, I was!  It's far from a perfect movie, but then again this is Bay's best.  When talking only in the perspective of Michael Bay movies, this is a good thing.  In the big picture, that's not saying much.  If this was his first or second movie, I would have been optimistic about his next films.  But it's not.  There's a chance that Bay is growing up a bit, but this is still far from a feat of filmmaking, and remains mediocre summer action fare.  But if that's what you're looking for, this might not be so bad to check out.

GRADE:  C

Reviewed 7/24/05