Every so often, I’ll watch a Michael Bay movie. I don’t know why. I rarely like them (I did enjoy the first Transformers when I saw it and The Rock was pretty good as I recall). Bay has a reputation and style that is very distinctive in a mindless sort of way where things explode and women stand around and look sexy. There doesn’t seem to be much ambition to his work.
But every so often, he does something that is clearly more ambitious, and The Island is one of those instances.
Life is very routine for Lincoln Six-Echo (Ewan McGregor). He wears the same clothes in the same colors every day. He can’t get the breakfast he wants. He believes he’s living in a special facility where he works, eats, plays, but never goes outside. He will be allowed to one day if he wins the lottery and can go to the Island and live out the rest of his life in a paradise. In the meantime, he thinks he’s a lucky survivor of some kind of disaster, doing what he can to get by in the far off year of 2019.
He does have something of a friendship with fellow survivor Jordan Two-Delta (Scarlett Johansson), but the various administrators keep discouraging them from getting too close. Things get worse when Lincoln realizes the Island is a lie, winners are having their organs harvested and then killed, and Jordan just “won”. Can Lincoln figure out what’s really going on and blow the whole thing up before the guy in charge, Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean) can shut down things in a way that won’t work out well for Lincoln, Jordan, or a whole lot of the people they know?
Now, I said above this is Bay being ambitious, and I meant that. Lincoln, Jordan, and the other “survivors” are really clones of rich people being held in reserve in case of a deadly accident. As such, there’s some smart thinking going on when Lincoln and Jordan manage to escape to the outside world in that, though Lincoln is getting flashes of memory from his “sponsor” (Tom Lincoln, also McGregor obviously), the two are very ignorant on a lot of things. They don’t really know how the outside world works, and it shows. There’s a naivete to these characters, and the movie tries to get into the ideas of who and what makes a person and how the wealthy can abuse people for their own benefit and so forth. Bay manages to approach these ideas while still keeping his standard style of kinetic camera movements, fast cuts, festishization of military hardware, and women who seem to exist just for men to look at them. In fact, given how her career has gone lately, it is a little weird seeing Johansson playing a more damself-in-distress sort of role.
But for all that he tries, the movie still reverts to standard Bay-level destruction. The longer the movie goes, the more it turns into a standard action movie in the Bay style with a lot of flashy moves and not much time to think about what’s going on. Those moments, where Bay can be Bay, probably does more to undercut the weightier moments than Bay’s reputation, mostly because that is Bay living up to his reputation. In another director’s hands, this could have been a much smarter movie. That Bay tried it is to his credit given how many giant robot movies he’s made since then, but the whole thing just doesn’t quite hold together despite a promising premise from someone who isn’t know for working with promising premises.
Grade: C+
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