The Island
The Island is the scariest movie I’ve seen in a long time. I’m not sure if this is because it illustrates just how easily a population of adults can be controlled by fear and the shared memory of a catastrophe or if it’s because this movie is such a perfect example of how a dark, complicated script can be remade into a hollow shell of itself with the addition of a whole bunch of Hollywood money.
Must Love Dogs
Sarah (Diane Lane) and Jake (John Cusack) both divorced and broken hearted, meet through an online personal ad and the meddling of their friends and relations. Theoretically perfect for each other, Sarah and Jake dance around the issues of love, betrayal, honesty, and vulnerability with about as much depth as the average puddle.
The Island
The Island is the scariest movie I’ve seen in a long time. I’m not sure if this is because it illustrates just how easily a population of adults can be controlled by fear and the shared memory of a catastrophe or if it’s because this movie is such a perfect example of how a dark, complicated script can be remade into a hollow shell of itself with the addition of a whole bunch of Hollywood money.
Despite the huge stunts polished to a high glass by director Michael Bay, a man who specializes in style over substance, The Island does reveal a couple of interesting things about human nature. At its base, this movie is about fear.
Set in the not-so-distant future, The Merrick Institute, housed in an old missile silo in the Arizona desert, provides to its clients the ultimate in insurance plans: a clone to replace whichever parts happen to be failing. Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean) sells his clients a custom grown “agnate” that matures into adulthood and is kept in persistent vegetative state so whatever organs you happen to need can be harvested when you need them. What the clients don’t know is Merrick, like most government contractors, is cutting corners and using the matured agnates, who aren’t vegetative at all, as his labor force. The clones are kept in line by a series of programmed memories and the fear of a shared catastrophic event which has contaminated the outside world and devastated most of the population. To explain the sudden removal of members of “the community” from their midst when a client calls in an insurance policy, Merrick adds one more control to the clone population: the promise of “the island,” the world’s last unspoiled paradise, free of “contamination.” Two of the clones, Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) and Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson), learn the truth of the island and the bulk of the film is spent on the pursuit of the two clones through the real world outside Merrick’s holographic screens.
Beyond the fact that it doesn’t take on in any meaningful way the ethical implications of the buying and selling of human beings, The Island misses a lot of its own cues. Much is made, for example, of the dietary restrictions Lincoln chafes under yet once they’re out in the real world, the movie allows no time for the clones to be dazzled by the array of food choices they have available to them. Instead, Lincoln and Jordan’s discoveries are limited to the one thing that Merrick thinks he’s engineered out of the clones: sex. So, if Merrick’s managed to engineer out the sex drive, why are the clones segregated into single sex dormitories? Why do physical proximity rules that limit contact between opposite sex clones exist in Merrick’s little community? And by having Ewan McGregor play both the clone (with an “American” accent) and the client (with his native Scottish accent) they did him a great disservice: hearing his real voice immediately next to his American accent makes him totally unbelievable as an American, at least to the ear.
For these flaws, and for being too long by about 2/3 of a chase scene, I have to give this movie 2.5 popcorns out of 5.
Visit the official site
Must Love Dogs
Sarah (Diane Lane) and Jake (John Cusack) both divorced and broken hearted, meet through an online personal ad and the meddling of their friends and relations. Theoretically perfect for each other, Sarah and Jake dance around the issues of love, betrayal, honesty, and vulnerability with about as much depth as the average puddle.
Sarah is supposed to embody the typical woman of middle age, abandoned by her husband for someone much younger, while Dolly (Stockard Channing), one of the women dating Sarah’s widower 70-something father Bill (Christopher Plummer), is supposed to be the spirit of optimism, of hope. And while every single character in this film does embody something, don’t look behind the facade: the characters are entirely one dimensional.
The players in this film — Diane Lane, John Cusack, Christopher Plummer, Elizabeth Perkins, and Stockard Channing — are so much better than the material in the script. There’s no tension whatsoever in the narrative (if you think for even a minute you’ll be able to figure out how the film ends) and every single plot point is visible from a mile away.
Romantic comedy isn’t as easy as it can be made to look, but then again, the standards aren’t that high. For not even meeting those, I have to give this film 1.5 popcorn out of 5.
Visit the official site