The Island: Movie & DVD Review (2005)

(Originally published 2005)

Michael Bay's "The Island" is the director's best, most grown-up effort to date, which might sound like a rave, but let's not overdo it.

Let's first put it into perspective.

A glance behind Bay's closet door, after all, finds its share of rattling skeletons - "Bad Boys," "The Rock," "Armageddon," "Pearl Harbor," "Bad Boys II." All are movies in which the director, cast and crew obviously consumed bales of spinach before muscling their thin stories onto the screen.

They did so with an aggressiveness that might serve the genre's base, but which also came at the cost of offering audiences any recognizable trace of humanity.

There isn't one movie in Bay's collection that isn't a live-action cartoon. One only has to witness the horror of "Pearl Harbor," which should have been the most serious of movies, to see just how difficult it is for him to realize a believable character or situation.

The reason his films don't hold up isn't just because he ultimately demands that we take them seriously, but because the cheese factor he favors is usually off the wheel. Here is a man who serves his brie baked with napalm.

It's hot, yes, but just try getting through it.

On some levels, "The Island" is a departure for Bay, even though it it's hardly a departure for us - the film reaches deep into "Logan's Run," "Coma," "Minority Report," "Blade Runner," Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and any number of other sci-fi movies and books to finds its hook and groove.

The reason it's better than Bay's other films is because he has created for himself a level of humanity that plays to his strengths. The movie stars Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson as two clones with stunted intellects, thus giving them concrete reasons for their limited abilities to reason. If those aren't characters tailor made for Bay, I don't know what are.

Here, in the middle half of the 21st century, McGregor is Lincoln Six Echo, which sounds like a rap group but which really is a man living in white spandex in an underground facility where he allegedly is being kept safe from the deadly toxins poisoning Earth. Joining him are hundreds of others, including Johansson's Jordan Two Delta, all of whom pine for a chance to live on the island, which is apparently the last pristine place on Earth.

To live there, one is selected by lottery. Your name is called, some men and women in dark suits come to collect you and then, teary eyed with relief and happiness, you're led away, with your friends cheering and every indication that soon you'll be sipping margaritas in a beach chair at water's edge.

Not the case.

Soon, Lincoln Six Echo gets the idea to nose around. What he discovers isn't just the horror that he's a clone, but that he was cloned so his organs could be harvested for the rich, ailing SOB whose life depends upon them, and that the lottery is leading people straight to their deaths.

When Delta is chosen for the island, Echo warns her of what he knows, her lips part in fear, and the action ignites, with the story following their flights into the brave new world that awaits them beyond the facility. It's there, in the strange outside, that the killing machine Albert Laurent (Djimon Hounsou) has been hired by the evil head of the facility, Merrick (Sean Bean), to slay Echo and Delta lest they mingle with real humans.

As they say, let the carnage begin.

Since it's the familiar territory of guns, explosives, chases and car wrecks in which Bay feels most comfortable, the rest of the movie embraces that level of comfort. Backed by Nigel Phelps' excellent production design, which imagines believable, not-so-distant city - and landscapes, and a score by Steve Jablonsky that hammers the sound system like a child beating on a metal pot, the film leaves its timely comment on cloning behind to become a summer action film.

Initially, that's a disappointment, but when you realize that Bay probably isn't the best-qualified person to make such a comment on such a dicey subject, the reprieve of gunfire, collapsing buildings and the sight of two hot-looking stars running around the screen in their tighty-whities is something of a relief.

Grade: C+