It’s terribly clear exactly when the 2005 sci-fi/action/thriller The Island becomes a bad movie: The moment when clone Ewan MacGregor breaks out of the clone bunker with clone Scarlett Johannson, and the cartoonish corporate “bad guys” start chasing them with really big guns. What follows 1 1/2 hours of confusing car chases, shameless product placement, and plot holes so big you could drive your $25 million expermental boat through them. I literally LOL’d several times because the action and plot were just that unbelievable. It’s funny, for example, when Amistad Smith (that actor from Amistad…you know the guy) tells his men to kill the clones “quietly”and they go up to the roof of an LA skycraper and shoot their machine guns down into building’s giant corporate logo because the clones are hiding inside. It’s then hilarious when the logo falls off the building, hits a nearby helicopter, and falls at least 50 stories to the ground. Well, that’s not the really hilarious part: Not only do the clones walk away from the 50-story fall, but the press doesn’t seem remotely interested that a logo fell off the side of a skyscraper and hit a helicopter after a chase that saw several people flat-out die in car wrecks and Ewan MacGregor drive a Return of the Jedi-style hoverbike through an entire office building. The stupidity kinda makes it less thrilling, you know?
I’ll give another example, one that really killed me. So, the clones are on the run and looking for a phone booth so they can call their human “sponsors” and prove to the world that this whole cloning thing is producing sentient beings that can feel pain and play video games, right? They find a phone booth on the streets of L.A. that is run by MSN — that’s right, the Microsoft Network is running public phones in 2019. Did I mention it’s just 11 years from now? Anyway, the phone booth features a 22-inch-or-so touch-screen that allows the phone booth customer to find and call anyone they wish to by name. Not only is this open phone booth with expensive electronics in it completely unvandalized, but it turns out that everyone has video-phones in 2019! The best part is when Scarlett asks for “Sarah Nelson” and the call goes through to the right Sarah Nelson, who also happens to be a world-famous supermodel. That’s right, a stranger off the street could go into a phone booth and get instantly through to a celebrity’s video phone! It’s this kind of thing that makes it impossible to take The Island seriously.
But let’s talk about the first 45 minutes, which is pretty good. Ewan MacGregor wakes up after a recurring nightmare and goes through his day in a strange world where one’s pee is scanned for salt and everyone has the exact same clothes and job and lack of knowledge about the outside world. We quickly learn that there is some sort of “contamination” outside their compound that prevents them from leaving, and that a random lottery sends one of them at a time to “The Island,” a supposed paradise with an apparently limited amount of space.
Ewan MacGregor questions all this nonsense, and eventually breaks to the compound’s human control level and finds that there is actually no contamination and no island paradise, and the lottery “winners” find themselves harvested for their organs/babies and then totally killed. It’s pretty much the most horrible situation anyone could ever come up with, and the movie spends a great deal of time explaining how the promise of longer life turns rich and powerful people into Hitlers. However, it never really explains why none of the rank-and-file workers never blow the whistle on the unconscionable situation (but by the time you realize that there’s 100 other, more pressing, plot holes to deal with).
The whole thing brings to mind the TV show Alias, where entire shadowy international spy organizations were formed to study a man named Rambaldi in an effort to find eternal life. There were a lot of innocent people killed there, too, but the difference between Alias and The Island is that in Alias somebody actually cares enough to investigate. They built an entire show around these investigators, in fact. The Island‘s clones are forced to break themselves out and tell the world what’s going on. In a country rife with class warfare and at-the-drop-of-a-hat political indignation, how long do you think it would take for somebody to figure out the clones are alive?
Anyway, I’m getting bogged down here. I could talk about the plot holes all day, sadly. Just know that if you want to enjoy this movie, you’re going to have to bring along a whole 26oz container of iodized salt.
The first 45 minutes of clone world was interesting enough to make me want to watch the whole 2 1/4-hour film, and for that I curse Michael Bay. When do I get to see a good movie?
