The Island
Michael Bay is apparently the creator of utter crap. He did Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, and most recently, he did The Island.
I haven’t seen the first two I listed but I just watched The Island. It’s a very interesting and original take on dystopia. It’s also a highly highly flawed peice of cinema. I am going to review it but also analyze and recap it. What follows is going to be spoileriffic. In order to discuss the movie, I’m assuming you either haven’t seen the movie and don’t intend to or taht you’ve already seen it. If that is not the case, I suggest you try and ignore the parts I’ve put in a block quote.
A recap of the complicated plot can be found on the Wikipedia page for The Island.
Quick note: When I say you do something, I’m just assuming. I really mean to say what I think the audience would be feeling based on my own opinions.
There are a lot of topics which are “discussed” in the film. Most prominent is the idea of using a clone as an organ bank. This is not a truly original idea and has been used in many pieces of fiction including the excellent book, House of the Scorpion. It’s an interesting thing to ponder. Is it right to create a living being to destroy it?
Another one of the film’s issues, though much less up-front was this idea this idea of a clone killing its sponsor.
When the police/military/army/whatever tracked down Lincoln and his clone, there was a classic, “Which one is the clone?” kind of scene where a police/military/army/whatever was forced to try to decide which one is the original and which one needs to be shot. Despite the cliche, this is probably the most interesting segment of the movie. It presents the viewer with a little bit of an ethical dilemma. Either the main character or a relatively innocent person is going to die. Which is the lesser of these two evils? Of course, if the film had been doing things right, then you’d empathize with the clone easily, but as the film was, you bonded with the original Lincoln much mroe than you bonded with his clone.
I haven’t watched with the audio commentary yet, but I think that Michael Bay’s intention was that the viewer would hope for the death of an innocent person. A little later, the clone-making company contacts Lincoln (or at least they think it’s him.) and says they’re sorry for the inconvenience that the clone might of caused him. The inconvenience it casued him was that he lost everything. He died because of a fucked up prdouction line in a system that has questionable ethics to begin with. It was very disturbing to me.
The film had the capacity to be as good as sci-fi action classics such as Total Recall but fucks up in it’s premise weaknesses, pointless segments showing off technology, uninspired action, plotholes, and hard-to-like characters.
The premise is quite strong but it has bits of the hard-to-swallow in it. One of them is quite critical. The customers of the Clone-Makers are told that the clones are kept in persistive vegetative state and are not at all like people. Apparently, they can’t actually do that because without life, the organs don’t work. As unbelievable as it is on its own, it’s contradicted within the movie itself. If the organs didn’t work without life, then how could the clones live once they’d been hatched? (They’re born into adulthood.) If their organs didn’t work, then they could never be hatched. A better solution to why the clones have to be kept conscious would have been that the clone-makers used them for true labor. If the clones were in some sort of manufacturing plant, making clothes or something for the people of the outside world, it’d make sense as an extra source of revenue for an evil corporation.
The action scenes are pretty borign and according to critics who have seen other Michael Bay movies, rip off another Michael Bay movie. It’s a lot of barely justified mass-destruction and death. It makes it hard to blieve hyow evil the Clone-Makers are.
The pacing was also pretty wrong. It didn’t balance action and plot well. The first hour of the movie contains barely any action at all. Then there’s a too-long action sequence, some nice expository plot development, and some more crappy action scenes with plot mixed in. In order to make a good action movies, you need a balance between action and story.
I wish I had written something more coherent, but I don’t feel like continuing to write this and I also don’t want to come back and reorganize it. Too much work for a blog that no one actually reads.
August 5th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
I disagree, I think the movie was fine. The scene you mention is actually well done, and I think the viewer already dislikes the original, when he finds out that his clone is an actual person, he doesn’t gives a fuck, and lies to him, pretending to help when he only wants his organs. He didn’t deserve to die, though.
if the premise of the clones doesn’t makes much sense from a biological standpoint, who cares? is just a start point for telling a story. If you really wanna know, most “time paradox” in time travelling movies don’t make much sense either. the metamorphosis in the classic kafka novel? why, he never explains why samsa becomes a bug! damn, that kafka sure sucked, right?
I liked the movie because the story begun like a totalitarism kinda of movie, but then revealed to be something else altogether. the action movies were boring, and the whole “I have memories from my original being” seemed to me like a dumbass excuse to put boring action scenes in the movie. So yeah, I’m not going to argue the movie was perfect, far from it, but far from absolute suckiness, too.
August 5th, 2006 at 8:48 pm
On First Point,
I guess it’s jsut that I liked him for some reason.
On Second Point,
it’s just a bothersome thing. I wish I could shut my brain off more selectively but when a movie is meant to start making you think, then you start to see all of the flaws within the plot and premise. I agree it’s a dumb thing to criticize a movie for but it did bother me.
On Third Point,
Absolutely agreed. I just wish that they didn’t spoil the totalitarian thing right on the back of the DVD box. I’m sorry if I poorly articulated myself earlier and that didn’t come clear. It’s a flawed movie that pisses me off because it had much greater potential.