dir. Michael Bay

"The Island" is the second Ewan McGregor film this year to disappoint, and not even in the perfunctory way of not being worthy of the man’s talents (e.g. "Star Wars"). Robots and The Island disappoint in a noxious sort of way, presenting standard messages about what it means to be alive and have a soul while simultaneously employing filmmaking that is itself completely soulless. In Robots, a cheery meditation on mass genocide, at least there were some moderately funny jokes. In The Island the funniest joke is Scarlett Johansson playing a vacuously-constructed clone. You never really know if she’s over-acting (Look, I’m the naïve product of a science experiment!) or under-acting (Look, I’m in a big dumb action movie!).

But watching the two movies sent chills down my spine because after willingly going to see these mind-numbing confections maybe it was I who was the clone watching my predetermined form of entertainment. McGregor is probably readier than ever for the Trainspotting sequel.

Phoniness, Michael Bay’s greatest theme, permeates "The Island." But previously his penchant for overly expressionistic camera movement was tempered by producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who could populate Bay’s gloss with stars to match (Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Will Smith, Sean Connery). This time the stars are some indie film darlings who figure they’ve got to “do action” so they can have it on their resume. The trouble is, rather than trying to subvert the film as Johnny Depp does in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” they play along too boringly well.

Bay’s first movie without Bruckheimer as producer hurts here especially because the story aims for more than just an action tale. It involves clones being harvested for their wealthy non-clone counterparts, giving the right wing both spoiled celebrities looking to cheat death and scientists who want to use stem cells to cure disease in a bid to become God. Of course the scientist has to be played by a foreign-accented individual who can grow every organ except his own heart. Without another Passion of the Christ this year, I suppose we had it coming.

The irony is that the film’s excesses never criticize the sterile clone world but rather glorify it, showing nifty things like how they fight in a new virtual reality Xbox. Even the clones’ propaganda entertainment, big screen TVs showing brief glimpses of a promised island getaway along with a sexy woman announcer, are shot in virtually the same super-kinetic extreme color palette of the whole movie, begging the question of where the propaganda begins and ends. Surely a film that brandishes two dozen product placement ads in an unusually billboard-like manner cannot really care about the answer to such a question. But after unfulfilled expectations that this could be a wonderfully incisive sci-fi epic, the question I had as the credits rolled was instead, “When will Bay, one of our most capable action directors, learn to grow a heart?”
-Howard Ho