The Island is sort of two films in one, but it is not better for it. It is clearly inspired by George Lucas’ THX 1138, but while no one can accuse Lucas of being emotionally cogent, he makes it work to his advantage in creating the future society, but Bay seems interested in having his cake and eating it too. Not only does he want to deal with emotionally stunted persons, but he also wants them to grow into real human beings. As a character-director, he is worthless so he ends up having characters that are little more than narrative devices to drive the story further.
The world we are presented with is an anti-septic, white future where eveyone have few emotional investments, hardly any friends and no family life at all. Families and children are completely absent. Instead, we see people working without asking questions or having any interest in the work they produce, they obey the system they work for, which keeps them under constant surveillance so that the most minor outburst is noticed and contained. In essence, a perfect capitalist society.
However, the problem is that we cannot believe in this, it has been seen far too many times. The white design of the future is primarily a 60s-70s thing and seeing it today it looks more oldfashioned than the future. That our society will develop into an emotionally stunted one it also very old and is a very dangerously simplistic way of viewing capitalism; while it may be one-dimensional (according to Herbert Marcuse and his One-Dimensional Man) it will inevitably need to redirect people’s desire for emtions. If this is what we see in the virtual fight simulator is an open question, but seeing a ban against proximity seems such a clear cliché that it becomes unbelievable.
Clichés, however, are rampant in this film. When we are introduced to Dr. Merrick he is, unlike others, dressed in all-black clothes, sitting in a darkened room. Guess who is the bad guy? You guessed right. While such a setup might have worked in Star Wars: A New Hope, it fails here due to the presumed suspense in learning what happens in the world.
The problem with the society we are presented with is that it follows in the footsteps of other similar films about what seems to be a utopian society, but in fact turns out to be a dystopia, albeit of disguised nature in the sense that conformity with the system can bring some positive aspects. This thought goes back to Logan’s Run, THX 1138 and have re-emerged in recent films such as Gattaca, Equilibrium and others.
What runs as a common theme in all these films is the individual’s fight against an impersonal system; emotions are often lacking (Logan’s Run, THX1138) as a result of society but when the protagonist rebels against society emotions soon come back to him. Most of these films are clearly criticisms of contemporary society but they generally handle it better than The Island. While the issue of cloning is an interesting and relevant one, no hard questions are really dealt with here, which may be understandable since it seems that Bay is primarily interested in making an action-film.
The societal critique seems backhanded and unclear; while capitalist society is condemned not only because of the way it creates the world of the clones, but also in its indictment of the people who buy the clones as insurance policies. Such a strategy is clearly posits the clones as commodities and the human body (though not mind) as a commodity. Unfortunately, this point is lost due to the immense degree of product placement in the film, thus clearly also turning the film into a commodity rather than a work of art. XBox, MSN Search, Mack trucks, Nokia, Puma clothing, the Johns Hopkins University and others that I have already forgotten are placed in the film.
Also, with a topic such as the one the film deals with, there are a number of pitfalls, all of which the film succumbs to. For some reason, some of the clones retains memories of the one they have been cloned from, so that our protagonist Lincoln 6 Delta easily remembers how to ride a bike, drive a car, fly a helicopter and so on because the original does. This is one of the most trite clichés about clones and very far from being at all realistic, but never mind that. Poetic license and metaphorical quality must always take precedence in fiction, I believe, but here it is simply an excuse for the creation of chase-sequences.
The film presumes that certain things a hard-wired into human consciousness, and that it will emerge given time, no matter how well suppressed. Sex and love emerge almost spontaneously in the two escaped clones, as do their general emotional development. The problem with this is not so much the general disbelief which this engenders, but simply the fact that this development is simply presumed and shown, but never convincingly. There is not enough time devoted to present the characters as growing in emotional responsiveness, nor do the actors succeed in making this apparent. Not that I believe that this is their fault; their are several fine actors in the film: Ewan McGregor (Lincoln 6 Delta), Scarlett Johansson (Jordan 2 Delta) and Sean Bean (Dr. Merrick), but they all give less than stellar performances. This is not a film about characters, which is fair enough, but because of that the film fails in the places where it requires character driven action, which is never present due to the spectacle-filled blockbuster that is the film’s main focus.
However, even this focus of action-spectacle doesn’t really succeed all that well. While there is no technical flaws at all in the execution of the chase sequences or the CGI or anything else, the scenes simply seem a bit devoid of soul or anything that might make them interesting. They don’t have the over-the-top silliness of xXx or the cool execution of Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy. So even as an action film The Island fails and it has nothing apart from that to offer, so it ends up as a bit of a noisy spectacle but ultimately empty.
What is interesting, for me, is the way that it has the same premise as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go but with a completely different approach. As such, the two texts are perfect examples of how the same premise can be dealt with in radically different ways and yet remain similar in certain ways.