July 22, 2005

Michael Bay’s THE ISLAND was a notorious financial flop – his first – and still his worst movie according to my friend Matt Lynch, who is knowledgeable about such things. But it did enjoy some time with a reputation as “the not-as-bad Michael Bay movie,” as recorded in my review when I first got around to seeing it in 2013. I seem to remember sort of agreeing with that assessment – because the editing and insanity is toned down it’s a less pure Bay experience but a more tolerable one if you fucking hate his usual style, as I certainly did when this came out.

But I guess now that I’m a little softer on his works in general it doesn’t really seem like a good use of his time to be doing the dumb man’s version of intelligent sci-fi, with a pretty cool idea ripped off from PARTS: THE CLONUS HORROR according to a copyright infringement lawsuit that DreamWorks settled for seven figures. I assumed it was probly just a similar premise they came up with separately but reading the Wikipedia summary of CLONUS this actually sounds much closer to a remake than plenty of official ones! But I can measure it on its own merits, even if stolen.

It takes place in the futuristic year of 2019, when people are living in an enclosed community wearing identical white jumpsuits, having their health closely monitored and their diet controlled. It’s not quite as miserable a dystopia as THX-1138 – it’s kinda like that crossed with living on a cruise ship – but like THX it takes place in, to quote Boomhauer, “a world where love is against the law.” Our hero Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor, last seen in STAR WARS: EPISODE III – REVENGE OF THE SITH) is close with Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson, NORTH, THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE) but just talking to her too much gets him warnings of a “proximity violation.”

Everybody works menial jobs they don’t understand and dreams of getting lucky and winning the lottery to start a new life on “the Island,” a paradise that I guess avoided the deadly pollution that drove society into this complex. But Lincoln has a reoccurring nightmare where he and Jordan are going there on a sleek futuristic yacht and then are drowned by fast-edit zombie dudes.

Dr. Bernard Merrick (Sean Bean, EQUILIBRIUM, which also takes place in a world where love is against the law) is not only Lincoln’s doctor, but the guy running the whole facility. He wears a black suit and has a Picasso in his office, so don’t trust him. Lincoln has also illegally befriended a salt of the earth “supervisor” named James “Mac” McCord (Steve Buscemi, FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN), who lives off site in “Sector 5,” he says, works in the sparks and steam factory, and lets Lincoln swig from his flask in his “office” decorated with collages of swimsuit models.

The big twist is that (20 year old spoiler) they’re being lied to – the world is not contaminated, there is no island, they’re all clones of rich people being harvested by a corporation in case their counterparts need organ transplants, or in some cases to give birth to their babies. So when Jordan wins the lottery it’s bad news not because Lincoln will be left behind, but because it means they plan to kill her. Lincoln sneaks around and figures some of this out just in time to grab Jordan and get her to escape the facility with him the morning she was supposed to go to the Island. I was really bothered that when the rug is pulled out from under her life he shows now sympathy for her devastation and just makes a crack about how she was dumb to believe it.

When they get out the place is surrounded by regular desert, not the contaminated wasteland they’d been told it was. The helicopter shot rotating around them reminded me of Slash’s guitar solo in the “November Rain” video. I thought it would’ve been cool if beyond the fence there were just generic suburbs, like this was all going on right under everyone’s noses.

That’s not the case, but not far away is the city, mostly normal except for futuristic 2019 touches like a skycar, a hovertrain and of course MSN Search booths. (It’s funny how many little things are off in these sci-fi futures just because we didn’t know there’d be smart phones.) They figure out how to locate his buddy Mac at a bar he hangs out at, Mac helps them understand what’s going on, and they decide they have to track down their “clients,” who believe their parts come from an organic blob and not a person. To protect the business Dr. Merrick sends a team of mercenaries led by Albert Laurent (Djimon Hounsou, LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER – THE CRADLE OF LIFE) into the city to stop the truth from getting out by any means necessary.

So it turns into more of an action movie. The best parts are some spectacularly detailed crashes in a MATRIX-RELOADED-like high speed chase scene. After spending so much time pretending to be a sort-of-thinking-man style of science fiction, though, it feels kinda off when it switches to nothing but loud bombast for a long section.

At least it’s not anonymous, I guess. There are other types of Michael Bay flair to it too, such as technology that goes extra gruesome. There are these little b.b. robots that crawl into Lincoln’s eye sockets

and tasers that graphically hook into Michael Clark Duncan (SIN CITY)’s flesh like he’s in HELLRAISER.

And that happens in an intense scene where his character (not that much more than a cameo) wakes up during surgery realizing they’re going to kill him and makes a run for it with all kinds of equipment still attached to him. That’s pretty harrowing.

There’s one kind of funny part where they play with the clones not knowing anything including what “take a dump” means, but it seems totally out of the blue. I have long believed Bay’s biggest weakness is his terrible sense of humor and reckless disregard for tonal control. To his credit this one has less of that than ARMAGEDDON, etc. But I’m afraid there is a scene where Lincoln confronts McCord in a bar restroom and a guy walks in and thinks they’re gay. I suppose the progressive part for Bay is that the guy seems surprised but not necessarily disgusted. But another option would’ve been to not do this stupid joke yet again.

My friends at the podcast Action For Everyone like to call themselves Baytriots, and I genuinely love that for them. I like Vyce Victus’ pushback against the perception of Bay as a right wing filmmaker; he has a really interesting interpretation of AMBULANCE as a movie about former tools of the military having all the weapons of the police and surveillance state used to stop them from stealing money for health care they’ve been denied. That streak sort of holds true here too, with the cops in the movie being worthless assholes and the evil corporation being the true authority with even worse guys pretending to be cops to do their dirty work. And when the plan depends on a rich guy having a conscience the plan does not work.

So I appreciate all that but on the other hand I forgot that it’s also full of Bay’s rancid misogynistic attitudes. They seemed so backwards at the time so you can imagine how great they play 20 years later. Of course he has a gum-chewing cafeteria server lady (Mary Pat Gleason, 13 GOING ON 30) who we’re supposed to think is an asshole and enjoy Lincoln being insulting to. But the terrible (and typical) one is the huge kick Bay seems to get out of McCord telling his wife or girlfriend Suzie (Shawnee Smith, IRON EAGLE, THE BLOB), SAW) in front of their guests, to stop talking and then to go buy them beer.

She’s only in the movie in that one scene to be humiliated and to explain why Mac has a closetful of women’s clothes for Jordan to change into. Of course they are very fashionable and happen to fit her body as if directly sculpted onto her.

If that’s not enough McCord also tells Lincoln “Alright look, I know you’re new to this whole human experience and all, but there’s one universal truth, and that is you never give a woman your credit card.” He’s a hacky old school sexist pig even for 2005.

Johansson was about 20 at the time and had been in movies for a decade, but was coming off of a big career breakthrough with LOST IN TRANSLATION. This was her first time cashing in with an attempted blockbuster like this, and really her first action-y role – it would be another five years before she started playing Black Widow and longer before doing movies like LUCY and GHOST IN THE SHELL. So looking back it’s really weird to see her playing this character who has to remain naive and sweet. Even though she’s established as being able to beat Lincoln in a virtual fight she spends the movie dangling from things and is left waiting in an apartment during what seems like it’s going to be the climax, only finally participating when they return to the facility to save the other clones. While Lincoln inherits some of his counterpart’s abilities to drive cars and motorcycles, Jordan’s is a Calvin Klein model who we only see on billboards and don’t actually meet. Jordan just getting her looks is all Bay can imagine.

It is funny that to Bay the idea of a horrible dystopia is that you can’t eat much bacon but you do have to eat tofu (in the tradition of Tom Cruise being repulsed by hummus in WAR OF THE WORLDS). Then again, he probly has experienced that diet considering how shredded he generally is. It’s also a weird notion that the clones are kept at a 15 year old mentality so they don’t want to have sex. Not sure about that math there, guys. I suppose it’s worth having that idea just to set up cinema’s most awkward kiss between two super hot people

(though they seem to get the idea pretty fast and then are instant pros at passionate PG-13 lovemaking).

I will also note that there’s an unusually flagrant level of product placement (everyone wears Pumas, the mocap fighting arena is sponsored by XBox, she buys all the kids in a park ice cream cones from a Ben & Jerry’s cart, there’s a random shot of a Johnny Rocket’s sign, etc.) I suppose it’s mostly weird because several of them are inside a facility entirely inhabited by people that don’t ever buy anything. Not the most desirable advertising demographic.

The script was written by Caspian Tredwell-Owen (BEYOND BORDERS) and then rewritten by Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci (writers from Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Alias who later did most of the TRANSFORMERSes and J.J. Abrams’ STAR TREKs).

THE ISLAND’s box office failure started with opening in fourth place behind CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, WEDDING CRASHERS and FANTASTIC FOUR. But it actually got some pretty generous reviews. Roger Ebert gave it 3 out of 4 stars, same as THE DEVIL’S REJECTS. But he observantly describes it as “a double feature” of a “creepy science fiction parable” and a “high-tech action picture” and says that “Both halves work. Whether they work together is a good question.”

20 years later I’d say no, they don’t really. But everyone involved has gone on to better things.