The Island (2005)

The Island (2005)

5/10

Starring

Ewan McGregor

Scarlett Johansson

Directed by Michael Bay

I recall 11 years ago seeing the preview of The Island and wondering what the hell the movie was about and for the lack of clarity in what the movie had to offer didn’t make me bother to line up in the cinemas to go see it.

Talk about bad marketing this movie boast of it, the movie catch line is “PLAN YOUR ESCAPE.” When I saw the preview back then with the catch line what I thought the movie was about is:

Some bunch of people on an island, playing a game where they have to come up with ideas on how they would escape to avoid being killed. The movie itself had nothing to do with such an idea.

I finally got to see the movie last night at a friend’s place and the movie is not so good. The movie delivers a thrilling chase of clone versus makers and keeps you glued. The problem with the movie though is the uneven blend of the beginning with the other parts of the movie. At first in the beginning we are taking on a boring drive down a lane of self-discovery of the two leads and then the movie kicks off when they escape and keeps the uneven tension going until they succeed in their task.

Another big unbelievable NO in the movie is the sex scene, totally unneeded and felt like I was watching a B-movie. Michael Bay must have believed a sex scene between Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson will bring in people to come see this movie, but that didn’t happen as The Island was a box-office bomb.

The movie real plot is set in the future (2019), where people insured their survival by paying for the creation of a vegetable mental state clone of themselves for organ harvesting. But what they didn’t know was the clones were not in the vegetable state, but were real and kept alive (trained to a mental awareness of a 15 years old and told that the outside world was contaminated, which is the reason they are living underground and safe from the contamination) and killed when the owner needs an organ.

After years of this technology going on flawlessly, a batch of the clones started becoming smarter and more aware of what is going on. One of the clones Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) discovered a moth and followed the moth until it escaped via a vent which lead him to believe that the outside world is not contaminated. He also discovered that the whole island they were was just a place where they are kept alive to be killed off at some later time, they were lured to killed under a guise of a lottery where the winner gets to leave the island.

Lincoln Six Echo and a friend Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson) escape from the Island into the real world to expose the things happening on the island.

Go see a better movie.