Someone was in my seat when I arrived for this movie, exactly one minute late. So I missed the opening credits. I was in time to catch the Peter Stuyvesant opening. Gorgeous girl on gorgeous boat with impossibly clear blue skies and sunfilled water. The movie maintained the crisp clarity of the opening commercial. I should have known Michael Bay was behind this, except it turns out to be by far the most intelligent thing Mr. Bay has produced so far. Dreams and death and the meaning of life? At one point McGregor’s character memorably asks a technician (played by the always watchable Steve Buscemi), “Who is God?” "When you want something real bad and you close your eyes and ask for it, God's the guy who ignores you," says McCord/Buscemi. This is a better conceived and balanced movie than The Rock, and a lot more intelligent than Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, and Bad Boys II. This is saying a lot: This is Michael Bay’s best and most exhilarating flick so far.
Ewan McGregor plays Lincoln 6 Echo, a clone who begins to have dreams and questions his existence. He is an innocent among many innocents, living in a concrete hive filled with white light and plasma screens purring and cooing with a woman’s voice. His life is one of maintaining a perfect diet, perfect health (his sleep patterns, urine and behavior are constantly monitored by ubiquitous dark suited chaperones), and avoiding ‘contamination’, until they are ‘chosen’ to go to ‘The Island’. This is what their purpose seems to be. To bide their time until they are selected, apparently at random, in a lottery.
Then innocence meets the cruel realities of our world. Does ‘The Island’ even exist? Jordan 2 Delta provides not only the answer to that question, but evokes the heart of this story, and brings in much needed subtlety and nuance. Scarlett Johanson is almost unrecognizable as The-blonde-in-the-opening-scene and she provides the perfect retinue for McGregor on the run. I saw her last in Lost in Translation, and here she is less demure, but still has something intelligently subdued about her, as Jordan Two Delta, the clone of a Calvin Klein uberbabe.
They live as monochromes in an environment just like them – artificial in every way. They are coached and counseled towards a tranquil state of mind. Intimacy is forbidden by the rules of ‘proximity’. It makes Singapore look dirty and licentious, and Korea, gaudy and artistic. It’s set in the world of 2019. The skies are incredibly blue; there is not a puff of pollution anywhere. There’s an irony about purity that seeps into the film somewhere. One aerial sweep of a cityscape left me gaping, and wondering which city this could be in America, and how on Earth did they find such a gorgeous day to capture the skyscrapers scintillating beatifically like that? It dawned on me later, as I saw sky trains and an unfamiliar design for a yellow Mercedes Benz, that this was the future, and half of what we were seeing was CAD and special effects.
Every scene in this film feels like it has just been scrubbed clean. Potent cars glint under a metallic sun, the desert sandpapers your skin, impact explosions seem to rip the fabric off your movie seat, and you can almost smell Djimon Honusou’s aftershave (last seen as Maximus’ confidant in Gladiator). The acting right through the sensory overkill is convincing, especially by the protagonists. One thing you’ll find fashioned into every Michael Bay film is that Cool Is God. If you like cool, you’ll love this movie.
What stunned me was the quality and integration – seamlessly interwoven into this bright, shining new world. Bay paints a beautiful new America, full of the spoilt and the rich, but exactly what is happening in the world and which fuels are running the nation we can only guess at. For all its beauty, some of the inhabitants, like the client, Tom Lincoln (Ewan McGregor) are not very nice people, and below the polished surface lurks disease and infirmity. This may not be an intentional device - this contrast between how things look, how cool something is and what is really happening, but it is effective. The message may be: is it really as wonderful as it looks?
And that is how the clones see this world as well. Appearances are not always as they seem - this is an increasingly popular subject in cinema these days. It mirrors the real world in the same way that art imitates life. There are other messages in this flick, if that’s what you’re looking for. Like the realities behind cloning, the consequences of questioning, the need for curiosity and awakening, the need to face up to our controls, our boundaries, our collective morality. Our stewardship on this planet, where we are rushed and rash and cruel to ourselves and each other needs to be checked and balanced. We do need to be born again as gentler, more subdued, and innocent clones of ourselves.
In my book, Bay provides impeccable visual standards to backdrop the delivery of this increasingly topical scenario: clones. I have read a few reviews, and one called this movie ‘hamburger’. Another, Peter Suderland writing for a Christian publication called Relevant writes: “Unlike the Bad Boys films or The Rock, which were played as seriously shallow action larks, The Island seems to think it has a higher purpose. The clones are referred to as “product,” and there’s a lot of mumbo-jumbo about the value of human life and God complexes.”
I differ from these and many other critics who seem to me to be hypercritical and flaw obsessed. I enjoyed The Island.
Do you know, ten years ago this movie would have been the next Matrix. Now the bar has been raised exceedingly high. The sheer number of movies coming out every single week is staggering. Our appetite appears to be insatiable. It’s a sad day when we are spoiled rotten with ultra high grade cinema, certainly in terms of style and sometimes content, and then become condescending about just about everything. The world seems to be turning all of us into perfectionists, seeking out all the errors and imperfections, rather than enjoying what we have.
What I enjoyed about the movie is the premise that the clones are like newborn people. They see the world from a changed perspective. We’re told that the clones, who are really walking insurance policies for their doubles in the real world, are empowered with the capacity and memories of a 15 year old. They’re valued (to a point), told that they’re special, and that they’ve been chosen and that their time will come. In retrospect, this psychology actually had an apposite effect to the one intended, which was to placate and control. They’re not told what macabre destiny awaits them when, God forbid, something happens to the client who paid for them.
The movie plays out the instinct for survival that overtakes them when they discover what’s really in store for them. The power in this flick is that it is exhilarating, in the way that being alive is exhilarating. It has that fresh exhilaration that we share with two newborn people who have never kissed, never driven a car, and never seen anything in the real world. They appear to have values, and care about each other in a world without contrivances like sex or money or any other distortions. Such a tale is in itself a contrivance, but a rather pleasant one. The scene at the end is affirming and uplifting, and the music inspiring.
If you want to complain about this movie, you could argue that the story could say more. You can always say that about a movie. If you want a good story, read a book, or wait for the book version of the film. You can always find some flaw somewhere, if that’s what you’re looking for. I wasn't trying to look for flaws, and that's the key to enjoying movies. I did notice that Ewan wasn’t quite making eye contact with himself over the kitchen counter. You can also argue that being cool, the foundation for this flick, is not the highest virtue. But this is a movie. This is fantasyland. Are movies supposed to do everything, all of the time? Even do the thinking for us as well? I think that’s left to the individual, how much you want to internalize the issues.
The job of a film should be to show you something new, open our eyes to new possibilities, to explore a theme, excite us and then let us imagine what goes beyond that, leave us to talk and decipher and fill in the void beyond the three dots.
When the end credits rolled, the guy who had been sitting in my seat clapped his hands.
Cinema today is a magical universe. But the enemy of anything good is a conceit that stokes impossibly high expectations. We’d all enjoy movies a lot more if we didn’t go in with our expectations hat guarding our view. Who wears a hat in the cinema? We are really living in a time where anything we can imagine we can put on the silver screen. From the plausible to the screamingly improbable to the laughably impossible. The Island has all of that. Here's a film where you can sit back, open your eyes and ears and forget everything. Be exhilarated. Don't forget to have fun. You're alive and well, after all, aren't you?
**** out of 5
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