It's too bad that, as soon as the action climax kicks in, Bay reverts back to his old grab bag of tricks so quickly. Following his standard M.O., he tries to move between genres, but really just makes different variations on the same bloated, overly-long action movie. In Armageddon, he gave us a disaster film that devolved immediately into a series of chase scenes and explosions. In Pearl Harbor, he rather offensively took a historical war epic and transformed it into a cheesy action spectacle with an obligatory love triangle at its core. With The Island, he takes a sub-Logan's Run 70's sci-fi thriller and transforms it, magically, into an action movie with lots of car chases. At least he's consistantly dopey, I'll give him that.
What's amazing is how close it all comes to working before collapsing under the weight of Bay's own internal suckitude.
The premise is supposedly one of those Matrix/Dark City subverted expectations/nature of reality mindfucks. But there's an interesting twist. We follow Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) and Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson) through their daily routines inside some kind of futuristic ocmpound, and even if they can't tell, we know something is wrong about this place immediately. Due to some unseen exterior "contamination," citizens of the compound lead dull lives of routine, awaiting the opportunity to one day visit the last uncontaminated realm on Earth...The Island.
Of course, as the advertising alerted everyone, THERE IS NO ISLAND! Minor spoilers follow...Really, the compound is just a housing development for high priced clones. See, in the future, rich people will be able to pay Sean Bean to clone them as an insurance policy, just in case they ever need spare organs or a surrogate mother or something. The clones are born as adults, educated to the level of a slow 15 year old and of course, are told nothing of their actual fates.
So what's interesting about that first hour of the film is that, though Lincoln and Jordan have no idea what's happening to them or why they're sealed in this compound, it's all fairly obvious to the audience. If not the specifics of why they're being held, at least the broad strokes - they're used as resources, they're sub-human, The Island is a fiction designed to keep them contented and to give them a goal. Bay uses his characters dim naivete in an almost...dare I say it...clever fashion, giving his viewers big hints and funny asides while keeping everyone on screen in the dark.
For poorly-explained reasons, Lincoln has a greater capacity for learning than his fellow clones and figures out that "going to the Island" really means "giving your life for science." So he and his buddy Jordan (they're asexual inside the compound...more on this later...) escape for the real world and a life of free will and limitless possibilities.
And that's when the film becomes more standard Michael Bay explosion-heavy wankery. We're introduced to Steve Buscemi doing his typical skeezy nerd routine, and he leads Jordan and Lincoln to freedom. Their creator (Sean Bean) naturally can't let his secret out - that there are very human-like clones dying each day to provide people with organs - so he hires a mercenary (Djimon Hounsou) to track down the clones...NO MATTER THE COST.
So the movie becomes a very by-the-numbers, non-creative chase movie. Bay doesn't have any fun at all with his future setting, really. Aside from some flying cars and improved public transportation in LA, it doesn't look very different from today. In Minority Report, Steven Spielberg spent months speaking with futurists and designers, trying to create a near-future world that resembled ours, but also represented the likely social and architectural development that may change cityscapes in the coming decades. Bay does nothing of the sort, and that's really a shame, because so few films even have the opportunity to create visionary worlds of the future. And here's this big-budget tentpole summer movie director who has a chance, and doesn't even try.
The science-fiction story completely unravels in the fim's second half. Here's a good question...Why don't Jordan and Linocln discover the magic of sexuality until after they're out of the compound? At one point, Bean hints that the clones are denied sex because it makes them more difficult to control. So are we to asssume that the are genetically altered to lack a sex drive? Or are they drugged in some way to suppress libido? If so, shouldn't Lincoln and Jordan be incapable of enjoying sex even on in the outside world?
Because the implication couldn't be that merely denying information about sex would prevent people from having sex, right? I mean, you don't really have to tell people all the salient recent data for them to develop a keen interest in one another's sex organs.
That's just one example of how Bay and screenwriters Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Caspian Tredwell-Owen abandon all narrative and thematic development once they get out of the compound. It's like they threw upt heir hands in relief, "Whew...made it through that expository crap...Now we can just write ceaseless car collisions and shootouts!"
With one exception...Towards the end of the film, Lincoln Six Echo meets his original counterpart, Tom Lincoln, (also, of course played by Ewan McGregor). Not only does the film earn some much-needed laughs from the disparity between Tom (and Ewan's) Scottish accent vs. Lincoln's American version, but it provides McGregor with a chance to really pull of a neat little trick. He actually plays Tom Lincoln and Lincoln Six Echo pretty similarly - it's as if they're the same man, but one has had the freedom to become a bastard while the other has been forced to become a nice guy. In fact, it's almost as if the same personality quirks that make Tom Lincoln a womanizing self-centered asshole make Lincoln Six Echo a charming and inquisitive hero.
In addition that nice little collection of scenes, the action that dominates the film's second half does work a bit better than the last few Bay features. Unlike Bad Boys II, things aren't so chaotic and unstructured. There are long chases, but you're always sure of where people are going and why they are chasing one another. The action sequences go on for so long in Bad Boys II, and involve so many barely-glimpsed characters, it's nearly impossible to follow the action in any sort of organized or reasonable manner. Not so in The Island. And though he's used it as a device before, the "throwing heavy metal objects out of speeding cars" sequence is pretty much guaranteed to look kind of cool on DVD.
And putting Scarlett Johansson in anything is always a plus. Bay was apparently down on her after the film flopped in theaters, blaming the fact that she wasn't a big star and that she "looked like a porn star" in the advertising. To be honest, she kind of looiks like a porn star in the entire movie. Or, if not a porn star, at least a demi-pornstar like Tara Reid.
But I wouldn't say that's a bad thing. In fact, I'd say it was more like the highlight of the movie.
Out of all Michael Bay films, I'd say The Island is probably his second-best effort to date. The Rock still stands as his definitive work, and by far the most entertaining movie he has directed, even though I still think it's way too long. Then, The Island, which has some decent action scenes and a pretty intriguing opening 45 minutes or so. Then the original Bad Boys, which is immensely stupid but tolerable and features somewhat amusing work from Martin Lawrence. Then, Armageddon, a loud a pulverizing piece of debris that stands as probably the worst single film to be offered on a Critierion DVD. Then, Bad Boys II, that odious, obnoxious and grim slog alternating between bad racist humor and bad gallows humor. Finally, bringing up the rear, Pearl Harbor. You wanna know how bad Pearl Harbor is? It's both Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett's worst film. BEAT THAT!
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