"That's a nice-a donut."
Sunday, February 05, 2006
The Island (2005)
With a Michael Bay film, most people tend to know what to expect: explosions, gun fights, car chases, minimal plot or character development, quick cut editing, fast-talking heroes, and a happy ending. It is only a slight exaggeration to call his movies a paint-by-numbers operation. You generally know what to expect, just as movie industry watchers tend to expect his films to make a lot of money. His fun, mindless movies are, for many people, the ideal summer popcorn getaway. So it came as a surprise to many when this past summer's flick The Island came and left theaters without much fanfare. So, are people finally getting wise to Michael Bay? Or is this a different type of Bay movie? Or was this simply an outlier in the scheme of things?
Well, in the Bay handbook, The Island pretty much runs the gamut of techniques. In addition to most of the things outlined above, we also have continuity problems, editing errors, and plenty of leaps in logic and reality. It is a bit more subdued than other Bay films, but his touch is still all over it - from the ultra-quick cut, MTV-style editing, to the flashy filtering effects, to the lack of real dialogue and warmth. Though, given that this is a remake of another bad movie - Parts: The Clonus Horror - it would have been foolish to expect much from it.
Lincoln Six-Echo (Ewan McGregor) and Jordan Two-Delta (Scarlett Johansson) are residents of a bland, monotonous society in the year 2019, living in the days after some sort of "contamination" wiped out all of Earth's living creatures. Everyone wears white clothes all the time, and have their meals and body's vital signs monitored by a big brother-like management. People there dream of being selected in the ongoing lottery, to be transported to a wonderful, tropical island where they can live out their days. But Lincoln begins to question things and when Jordan is selected for the lottery, we soon discover the horrifying secret of the facility. Much to their amazement, they escape the facility - still alive - and end up on a search to find all the answers. Is the island even real?
Compared to The Clonus Horror, The Island has more professional acting, and a much larger budget for set design and special effects. This helps the movie surpass Clonus overall. But some of the throwaway bit characters in the facility have more character development than Jordan. One of them is a worker (Steve Buscemi) who befriends Lincoln, but his time on screen is short-lived. Eventually it is just one action set piece after another, with little regard for believability. This is just one small thing, but with all the technological advances and other stuff, why didn't they just say that the year in the film was something like 2050, instead of just over a decade from now - when none of this would be possible?
The movie is kind of fun for a while, but by the end you'll most likely be thinking "blah, so what." The reason it bombed in theaters could very well have been a combination of all three possibilities: Michael Bay's stock is dwindling; it isn't quite the bang-bang action fest of his previous films; and maybe it was just a one-time thing and the marketing just didn't catch on with audiences.
The Verdict: C.
Michael Bentley 9:37 AM
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