Reel Time
No sci-fi thriller
By PETER COVINO
Article published on Thursday, Aug. 4, 2005
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| Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson star in “The Island.” |
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If only we could keep Michael Bay away from things that go boom, he might be capable of making a good movie.
Bay’s best 45-minute film ever just may be “The Island”. Unfortunately, “The Island” is more than two hours long.
After ruining big-rock-crashes-into-Earth movies (“Armageddon”) and sneaky-Japanese-destroying- naval-port movies (“Pearl Harbor”), Bay has set his sights on Stanley Kubrick territory in the sci-fi outing “The Island.”
For a while at least, Bay manages to fool everyone into thinking that this could be an interesting commentary on life in these United States.
Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson are the big guns here, two inhabitants in a high-tech society who are more than willing to obey the commands of their superiors. They are after all, the lucky ones, the few survivors from some unspecified contaminant that has killed off most of the world’s population.
So Lincoln Six Echo (McGregor) and Jordan Two Delta (Johannson) do their daily chores and hope that someday, they will be selected for the lottery, a chance to go to that paradise, The Island.
But as anyone who has ever read Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery,” knows, winning the lottery is not necessarily a good thing.
It is somewhere within the first 45-minutes or so of the film that Lincoln learns the truth about The Island and the lottery and he, along with the newest lottery winner, Jordan, decide escaping is their only option if they are to survive. Without giving too much plot detail away, let’s just say they find their civilization has taken stem cell research and cloning to nightmare proportions.
The escape is pulled off quite nicely and the couple find they have been part of a big lie, that there really is a whole world out there, outside their giant test tube existence.
And it is here that things in “The Island” begin to go terribly wrong. Bay sets those explosions in motion as car after car and truck after truck go boom along the highway. The first long scene where the couple uses their wits to battle the authorities from their home doesn’t play off too badly. But Bay feels the need to set the whole thing in motion again still later in the film with yet another highway chase with exploding cars and more.
What was once an interesting sci-fi film about a couple learning the truths about a sometimes ugly world instead gets buried in a blur of action scenes.
“The Island” actually worked a whole lot better when it was called “Total Recall.”
The film does offer a few nice co-starring bits, though, by Steve Buscemi and Sean Bean.
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Article published on Thursday, Aug. 4, 2005
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