The Island (2005)
Country: US
Technical: col/2.35:1 136m
Director: Michael Bay
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Sean Bean, Steve Buscemi, Djimon Hounsou
Synopsis:
In an America of the future, wealthy citizens take out a unique type of health insurance whereby their genetic information is used to 'grow' clones, who are supposedly kept in a persistent vegetative state until their organs or skin are required by their subjects. In reality, these 'subjects' are 'hatched' and live in a brainwashed ignorance in their underground facility, believing they are survivors of a catastrophic contamination event, their ultimate fate explained by having them win a lottery prize ticket to a notional island, the only unaffected paradise left on Earth. One subject begins to question his existence in this anodyne 'waiting room for life'.
Review:
Coincidentally emerging at the same time as Kazuo Ishiguro's similarly themed novel, Never Let Me Go, Bay's film is in any case only too aware (if it isn't, it should be!) of its cinematic antecedents (Logan's Run, THX 1138, Soylent Green, Coma, Capricorn One, Seconds, even One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest), all of which are at some point referenced in the production design and mise-en-scène, the white tracksuit-like costumes and Lincoln's laddered ascent out of the facility being but the most obvious examples. Fine in itself, as well as being fun for movie geeks, and no impediment to entertaining its audience with a good old yarn about what it means to be 'human', where the limits of morality and science lie, etc. The problems with this, perhaps undeservedly derided, film lie instead in the lack of star chemistry between the leads and the liberties taken with plausibility, once the leisurely story setup gets abandoned for a helter-skelter series of Transformer-style chases and escapes from wholesale destruction. These are impressive in themselves, but taken en masse, as the principals survive first an Amores Perros car wreck, then a high-speed pursuit involving careering train wheels, followed by a jet-bike encounter with helicopters and a fall from a seventy-storey building with little more than a scratch, to say nothing of several close-quarter rib-crunching encounters with Hounsou's Delta-Force heavies, they do begin to strain credibility.
Country: US
Technical: col/2.35:1 136m
Director: Michael Bay
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Sean Bean, Steve Buscemi, Djimon Hounsou
Synopsis:
In an America of the future, wealthy citizens take out a unique type of health insurance whereby their genetic information is used to 'grow' clones, who are supposedly kept in a persistent vegetative state until their organs or skin are required by their subjects. In reality, these 'subjects' are 'hatched' and live in a brainwashed ignorance in their underground facility, believing they are survivors of a catastrophic contamination event, their ultimate fate explained by having them win a lottery prize ticket to a notional island, the only unaffected paradise left on Earth. One subject begins to question his existence in this anodyne 'waiting room for life'.
Review:
Coincidentally emerging at the same time as Kazuo Ishiguro's similarly themed novel, Never Let Me Go, Bay's film is in any case only too aware (if it isn't, it should be!) of its cinematic antecedents (Logan's Run, THX 1138, Soylent Green, Coma, Capricorn One, Seconds, even One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest), all of which are at some point referenced in the production design and mise-en-scène, the white tracksuit-like costumes and Lincoln's laddered ascent out of the facility being but the most obvious examples. Fine in itself, as well as being fun for movie geeks, and no impediment to entertaining its audience with a good old yarn about what it means to be 'human', where the limits of morality and science lie, etc. The problems with this, perhaps undeservedly derided, film lie instead in the lack of star chemistry between the leads and the liberties taken with plausibility, once the leisurely story setup gets abandoned for a helter-skelter series of Transformer-style chases and escapes from wholesale destruction. These are impressive in themselves, but taken en masse, as the principals survive first an Amores Perros car wreck, then a high-speed pursuit involving careering train wheels, followed by a jet-bike encounter with helicopters and a fall from a seventy-storey building with little more than a scratch, to say nothing of several close-quarter rib-crunching encounters with Hounsou's Delta-Force heavies, they do begin to strain credibility.
Country: US
Technical: col/2.35:1 136m
Director: Michael Bay
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Sean Bean, Steve Buscemi, Djimon Hounsou
Synopsis:
In an America of the future, wealthy citizens take out a unique type of health insurance whereby their genetic information is used to 'grow' clones, who are supposedly kept in a persistent vegetative state until their organs or skin are required by their subjects. In reality, these 'subjects' are 'hatched' and live in a brainwashed ignorance in their underground facility, believing they are survivors of a catastrophic contamination event, their ultimate fate explained by having them win a lottery prize ticket to a notional island, the only unaffected paradise left on Earth. One subject begins to question his existence in this anodyne 'waiting room for life'.
Review:
Coincidentally emerging at the same time as Kazuo Ishiguro's similarly themed novel, Never Let Me Go, Bay's film is in any case only too aware (if it isn't, it should be!) of its cinematic antecedents (Logan's Run, THX 1138, Soylent Green, Coma, Capricorn One, Seconds, even One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest), all of which are at some point referenced in the production design and mise-en-scène, the white tracksuit-like costumes and Lincoln's laddered ascent out of the facility being but the most obvious examples. Fine in itself, as well as being fun for movie geeks, and no impediment to entertaining its audience with a good old yarn about what it means to be 'human', where the limits of morality and science lie, etc. The problems with this, perhaps undeservedly derided, film lie instead in the lack of star chemistry between the leads and the liberties taken with plausibility, once the leisurely story setup gets abandoned for a helter-skelter series of Transformer-style chases and escapes from wholesale destruction. These are impressive in themselves, but taken en masse, as the principals survive first an Amores Perros car wreck, then a high-speed pursuit involving careering train wheels, followed by a jet-bike encounter with helicopters and a fall from a seventy-storey building with little more than a scratch, to say nothing of several close-quarter rib-crunching encounters with Hounsou's Delta-Force heavies, they do begin to strain credibility.