The Island (2005) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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The Island puts the bay in Bayhem!

In a world where money is no object and ethics have been thrown out the window, humans are grown to harvest replacement organs in sick billionaires. Only two people can stop the process by escaping the facility and causing mayhem in Los Angeles. The Island is a high-tech thriller that short-changes sci-fi expectations for action and adventure.

First Impressions

One of the first things the trailer for this film tells us is there is no island! Glad that’s out of the way. Two “copies of people out in the world” realize that their jumpsuited-society might not be all that it seems. Car chases, explosions, and some crazy stunts tee up a film about two clones that escape the confines of their lives–but for what reason? Have your passports ready. The Island is our next destination.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

Fourteen years in the future (at the time of its release), on July 19, 2019, Lincoln Six-Echo (Ewan McGregor) gets ready for his day in a high-tech-looking colony where he and a number of men and women live after some contamination event that left the outside world uninhabitable. These people were saved by Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean) and his team and treated in the best possible way. Their diets, metabolism, and emotional states are carefully planned and monitored. Every few days there is a video announcement of a Lottery. The winner gets to go to “The Island,” where they can help repopulate the world.

Lincoln’s friend, Jordan Two-Delta (Scarlett Johansson) is able to get restricted food for Lincoln that he is denied, like bacon. Lincoln has been suffering from some disturbing dreams, which Dr. Merrick interviews him about. He is given a synaptic scan performed by small ambulatory microsensors that enter via his eyeball and will be peed out when finished. Lincoln also questions everything, wondering what they are even doing in the compound. During his work shift he sneaks into the steam tunnels to meet with one of the employees, James “Mac” McCord (Steve Buscemi).

While outside the normal areas of the compound, Lincoln finds a moth and follows it up a shaft where he emerges into a hospital corridor. There he sees “others” that are not part of the facility. He watches doctors kill the previous night’s Lottery winner, Lima One-Alpha (Siobhan Flynn) after she gives birth to her baby, which is handed to a woman who looks just like her. He returns to the colony where Jordan has just won The Lottery. Lincoln grabs her, convincing her The Lottery is a sham, and they run–ending up outside the facility in a desert in the southwestern United States. They soon discover the world is not contaminated and people are going about their normal lives.

Using a clue from the colony Lincoln finds Mac who gets them money and clothes to blend in. He explains that they are clones of wealthy people, kept at the facility to be used as spare parts which allow Merrick’s clients to live a long life. Lincoln believes if they can find one of their Sponsors, they can help free everybody else. Unfortunately, Merrick has hired a special forces team led by Albert Laurent (Djimon Hounsou) to track his “product” down. Mac is killed helping them board a hover train to Los Angeles where Tom Lincoln, Lincoln’s Sponsor lives.

While Merrick tries to keep things quiet inside the facility, claiming that Lincoln is in quarantine and Jordan is on The Island, Laurent leads a public–and destructive–chase through the streets of Los Angeles, losing his quarry. Lincoln and Jordan find Tom, who is slightly distressed seeing his clone. He promises to help them expose Merrick, but that is just a ruse. Lincoln convinces Laurent that he is the real Sponsor, so the mercenary kills Tom instead. Using this ruse, Lincoln returns to the facility, under the guise of needing to be rescanned in order to replace his clone.

Jordan allows herself to be captured, and the two of them, with some help from Laurent–who realizes what he is involved with, stop Merrick and shut off the holographic projectors that turn the old missile silo into the futuristic facility. They release all the other clones inside, who stream into the desert. Lincoln and Jordan then take a boat and sail away, just like in his recurring dreams.

“The whole reason you exist is because everyone wants to live forever. It’s the new American dream. There’s people out there that are rich enough to pay anything for it.” – James McCord

History in the Making

The Island is directed by Michael Bay but is not his first sci-fi. It’s not his last sci-fi film, nor even his best. But it perhaps encapsulates the term used to describe his filmmaking style: Bayhem. His directing style seems on display from his very first feature film Bad Boys, which is probably indicative of having honed his craft on music videos prior to that time. Both The Rock and Armageddon showcase elements of the style, which include frenetic action caught with a handheld camera and terse editing, mixed with fluid camera movements looking up at characters moving in the opposite direction to the tracking of the camera, often in slow motion (and throw an explosion or two in the background). Having developed this look and style over his previous five feature films The Island gets the distinct pleasure of showcasing every cliche shot associated with him, even to the detriment of the plot.

The film, at its basis, is a thoughtful warning about the dangers of unchecked science mixing with unfettered wealth to create a dystopian society that creates new people to mistreat. In the hands of almost any other director, this might have been a movie that tugged more on the audience’s heartstrings, rather than their adrenal glands. As it stands, the action sequences overshadow the thoughtful science-fiction aspects creating a dizzying and oftentimes absurd dichotomy between the monotony of the colony, and the action of the real world. Michael Bay’s style works fine for more standard action fare, like The Rock or Bad Boys II, but here, it seems to work counterproductively to the film. Perhaps his next film, Transformers, will relax the outrageousness a bit.

For its stars, The Island served as a breakout role for Scarlett Johansson. She had begun to make the transition from teenage actress, in films like Ghost World and Eight Legged Freaks (coming to 31 Days of Horror this October), to more adult roles beginning with Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. But this high-profile action film may be one that people recognize her from prior to her megastardom and her work in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Ewan McGregor, on the other hand, was just coming off his most visible role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequels–specifically Revenge of the Sith, released only two months previously. For him, this seems like a film that allowed him to loosen up and have a bit more of a good time, actually getting to play dual roles as both Lincoln and Tom.

Genre-fication

Of the various films about clones and cloning to date, including half a dozen in the previous ten years, The Island probably has the most engaging things to say about the perils of the technology–Bayhem notwithstanding. Films like The 6th Day and Replicant were mild action films, compared to this. While their clones were able to be created as full-grown adults, their view of cloning was limited. Attack of the Clones did not focus on the clones except as pawns in the political machinations of an evil man’s rise to power. This film has a lot of thematic elements surrounding the ethics as well as the biology of cloning, which will be discussed further below, while still using many of the tropes of the genre. These include the ability for clones to exist immediately as adults, giving the clones a child-like personality due to their short time being alive, and having the clones meet their biological basis (for all the fun–or wacky–moments that create).

The Island also leans heavily on the dystopian future society made popular over the previous 30 years of filmmaking. The film creates a seemingly idyllic world in a post-apocalyptic setting where only a few survive to carry on. There are certain parallels to other sci-fi films that viewers will probably recognize. Standard elements of dystopian fiction, such as the hyper-futuristic society compared to derelict industrial areas “outside” the city are a common general trope. But there are other, more specific, elements. The youthful pair of stars, in white jumpsuits, going on the run from a society that is trying to kill them has many echoes of Logan’s Run. Later, Lincoln’s escape up the long ladder into the harsh sunlight outside the silo lid eschews the closing moments of THX 1138 (while also becoming a second birth for him, thematically). Horror films are also represented in The Island. Both Coma and The Clonus Horror, films where patients’ body parts are harvested in unscrupulous medical facilities, have nods here as well. In fact, the creator of The Clonus Horror sued Dreamworks over the similarities between his film and this screenplay, settling out of court for an undisclosed sum.

Societal Commentary

At almost every turn, characters in The Island are there to remind audiences that the agnates (the clones) are not human. Merrick uses the most superfluous language to describe the clones as not human to his prospective Sponsors, ensuring they are completely at ease with the process. Even Mac, a working-class guy, states that Lincoln and Jordan are not human. He concedes by saying they are human, but “you’re not like a real person.” They are property, owned, grown, and harvested by the Merrick Institute at the whim of people with $5 million to spend on the luxuries of having a “body bag” to grow replacement organs or carry a child. It’s a small price to pay for treating people like cattle. However, the efficiencies of having a full human to replace a single part does not seem the most cost-effective–for either the Sponsor or Merrick. Starkweather Two-Delta (Michael Clarke Duncan), the clone of a famous football player, wins a trip to The Island and is in the hospital having his liver removed when Lincoln sneaks in. After the liver removal, was the plan to throw away the remaining “parts”? An extremely wasteful proposition, if that’s the case.

The film makes cloning seem like something that is relatively widespread by 2019. A Eugenics Law was created in 2015 to address the ethics of the procedure. Merrick assures his clients that the company adheres to all the laws, keeping these agnates (which he shows off as a protoplasmic sack of organs) in a vegetative state. He makes certain to also mention they never achieve consciousness. This, as audiences watch two super-attractive agnates think their way out of the facility. Obviously, this is the best way to grow the organs, as anything more is wasteful. But Merrick explains that their early efforts yielded poor results and that having the sentient and conscious agnates provides a superior product.

The film takes the side that clones are humans too, deserving of the same rights and privileges as any person born on the planet. Lincoln repeats something several times that Mac told him, “one thing I can tell you about people is that they’ll do anything to survive.” Lincoln proves this on many occasions. He is the equivalent to the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, he–uh, ”finds a way.”

The Science in The Fiction

The cloning technology of this near future seems amazingly advanced. This is not some small operation performed by a mad scientist (though Merrick certainly has a God complex). This is a multi-billion dollar operation where new agnates are spawned daily, put into a learning chamber where pre-recorded messages and imagery create a rudimentary education for them, followed by a society where they work, secretly, on maintaining up and coming agnates. Everything is done to minimize contact between men and women, with Merrick intimating that their libido is limited either chemically or through some sequencing of their genome during creation. The support for the several hundred clones that are living in the colony at any one time is a big job, requiring lots of support staff, who may or may not know about the real purpose, like Mac. There may be at least seven “generations” of clones, based on Mac’s description of the characters’ names. The Echo generation has been around for three years, and Delta is four, meaning there are probably three generations before them (Gandu mentions he’s been in the colony 7 years). It’s amazing that Merrick was able to hide the existence of this factory for so long.

The future of The Island also has a lot of interesting other technology, both at the facility and in the world. Many of the elements seem to have been inspired by the futurism seen in Minority Report. There’s the touchscreen computer built into the desk of Dr. Merrick, small spider-like droids that crawl into Lincoln’s ocular cavity (they’re not supposed to hurt according to Merrick, but they’re the size of a BB being forced into your eye!), and hover cycles that speed through downtown traffic. The showpiece may be the giant holographic projector that provides idyllic views outside the living quarters of the clones. The amount of energy and computing power to pull this off is unknown to 21st-century man.

The Final Frontier

Having now watched many science-fiction films back-to-back, the location where Lincoln and Jordan first stop after escaping the colony seemed familiar. This is the bombed-out building just off the roadside (of Route 39), where they encounter a rattlesnake–unaware of what it actually is. Checking my notes, this was the same location where Buddy, in Six-String Samurai, stops to get a drink and listen to a band. It is an actual location in Nevada and part of the Rhyolite Ghost Town in Death Valley.

The Island is not perfect, far from it. For viewers wanting some escapist entertainment–and patented Michael Bay action–it’s here in spades. But those loud explosions mask some quieter and more introspective elements that could easily be their own film. The film may broadcast its intentions within the action scenes, but these other sci-fi moments exist for viewers to discover on their own–even amongst the cacophony of the Bayhem within.

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