The Island

Only $12 million’s worth of box-office for Michael Bay’s latest opening weekend? Whither cinema? Surely people have been longing for another two hours plus of incoherent bangs and crashes and mind-numbingly long chase sequences? It’s been, oh, maybe all of two weeks since the conveyer belt spewed out the last such opiate.
Despite the comparatively piss-poor takings (it cost $125million to make – ouch) and lukewarm reviews, The Island is actually one of Mr. Bay’s more tolerable efforts; beside the moronically booming standards of Pearl Harbor or Bad Boys, if you squint just right, it looks kind of like Kubrick on an off day. Even the plot – a consideration rarely attended to in the circumstances – has a case of the smarts. In a post-apocalyptic 2019, Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson are squeezed into bootylicious body suits in an oppressive colony of survivors, their drone-like existence punctuated only by a weekly lottery for a place on the Earth’s last pathogen free island and visits to a dependably lizardy Steve Buscemi down in the scuzzy basement of the otherwise sterile complex. Totally unlike most lotteries, however, this one is all just a scam. In reality, the Earth is fine and dandy, the island is a fiction and the colony inmates are clones bred by the evil Sean Bean for the super-rich should they ever require a fresh batch of vital organs.
Having stumbled onto the terrible truth, Ewan and Scarlett attempt to seek out their progenitors to persuade them to do the right thing. Will these vaguely parodied versions of their celebrity selves - his proper human equivalent is a Scottish born boy-racer, she’s a model for Calvin Klein in one of the movie’s fifty million product placements – grant them their freedom? By the cornball denouement, you won’t give a toss.
That’s almost a shame too. For the first hour or so The Island actually makes amateurish forays into classical sci-fi inquiry. If genetic duplication is unacceptable in the case of sun-dried trophy wives seeking tautness where gravity has done its worst, is it okay when it’s a pretty young mommy in a life-threatening coma? Can we have flying cars please? What defines humanity? Once Mr. Bay kindly explains that the answer is consciousness and the ability to hold a windswept pose on a motorbike, the film gives up all pretence. Already a humdrum dystopian fantasy fashioned far too much in the graven high concept image of Bruckheimer and Simpson’s oeuvre (between the computerised tube sock drawers, vroom-vroom fetishism and trash-pit titty bars, it’s often more like a Duran Duran video circa 1984 than futuristic proper) by act three it’s just one long muddled chase sequence as Sean Bean’s goons hunt down the escapees, as dull as it is poorly directed.
True to type, the bangs and crashes are deafening, the guitars are riffing, the shots are relentlessly panoramic and the misogyny is rampant. Scarlett Johansson is given so little to say or do throughout, she might have easily been substituted by Matt Damon’s puppet in Team America: World Police. Still, making Scarlett seem boring is almost an achievement in itself and at least it’s in keeping with the rest of the film.