Review

Review Date: 24-July-05
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

The Island (2005)

During the first hour of "The Island," Michael Bay's cocktail of sci-fi, car crashes, and aggressive product placement, you might not notice how uninventive and manipulative it is, or how much of its plot makes no sense. For a while the movie is exactly what it ought to be, a melding of hot stars and cinematic thrills with a faintly cerebral prediction about the ends to which technology and ego may lead us. It isn't until it grinds to a bumpy stop and sends you out blinking into the light of day (or the bare fluorescence of the strip mall) that you realize just how empty it was, a rehash of ideas overlaid with a veneer of mass market smarm.

What interest "The Island" initially generates is attributable to Ewan McGregor, one of the aforementioned hot stars. As Lincoln Six-Echo, an inquisitive member of a colony of "survivors" circa 2060, McGregor supplies the perfect combination of boyish enthusiasm and manly allure that makes him instantly sympathetic; you know at a glance that he's worth more than the bleached-out, leisure suit, Cream of Wheat existence in which he toils as the movie opens. Apparently alone among his neighbors, Lincoln asks how he came to live in a closed and regimented environment after a "contamination" made most of the planet uninhabitable. Are there other ways of living? he wonders. Do his caretakers know more than they let on? And why are people periodically chosen to leave the colony for the halcyon shores of The Island, the last clean place on Earth? As McGregor begins to investigate these mysteries we are already on his side, rooting him on toward truth and liberty, and not just because it will get the action rolling.

Somewhere along the way, however, the longing for autonomy and understanding which McGregor embodies (and all sci-fi extols) starts to disappear under a barrage of what I can only describe as slickness. Lincoln's quest becomes urgent after his beautiful but necessarily platonic friend (Scarlett Johannson) is selected to go to The Island, which he soon discovers is a one-way ticket to Club Dead. Escaping their confines into a world they never knew existed, they rely on luck, physical fitness, and the kindness of strangers (or near strangers like Steve Buscemi) to elude capture and figure out what they are and what to do about it. This involves changing into sexy black clothes, engaging in loud vehicular pileups, and learning awfully quickly about violence, deception, and the joys of credit cards and sex.

As the plot degenerates into thoroughly present-day bombast, both in what happens and how it's presented, McGregor loses his soul to trendiness and with it his Everyman's charm. Suddenly the movie is revealed to be disappointingly familiar and predictable, awash in clichés like the "growth" of the bounty hunter (Djimon Hounsou) or his showdown with the evil scientist (Sean Bean). Now and then someone will avow that humans will do anything to stay alive, but this feeble attempt to link the origins of the tale to its latter, slavering devotion to fast cars, brand names, and supermodels can't fool anybody. In the end, when the heroes carry the day and the human spirit emerges triumphant, it doesn't even feel like a good thing. It feels like there are simply more clueless people in the world to help the greedy and malicious ones move the march of mankind along: the thinkers will keep on grasping for more, the rich will keep on abusing their privilege, and the ambitious will keep on devising ways to control the masses, pandering to the lesser drives in all of us with diversions just like this.

Copyright © 2005 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.