The Island is an action-packed Sci-Fi adventure that carries all the hallmarks, both good and bad of your typical Michael Bay film. It contains huge action sequences that rarely let up; sacrificing thoughtful commentary for the sake of explosions, and character development for car chases. Big and bloated, it still manages to entertain, thanks in large part to its two talented leads, Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson.
McGregor stars as Lincoln Six Echo, a man living in a futuristic complex with hundreds of other survivors of the end of the world. Every day they are told that there is only one place left on the outside world that remains livable; the Island. Their existence is a regimented and sterile one. Fraternization between the sexes is frowned upon and perfect health is mandatory. The one thing that everyone lives for is a chance to win the lottery, the prize for which is a one-way ticket to the Island.
Lincoln though, has begun to question his surroundings and his purpose. Plagued by dreams and intrigued by odd conversations with computer technician McCord (Buscemi), he's started asking questions that are making the complex's Doctor (Bean) very nervous. After discovering a living moth, Lincoln follows it up a ventilation shaft and finds himself in a part of the complex he's never been in before. Here he learns the truth of his existence. He and everyone in the complex are clones and the Armageddon story is fiction invented to keep them all afraid of leaving. His purpose is to serve as spare parts for his real-life counterpart in the outside world. Winning the lottery means that your "Sponsor" is in need of one of your organs. Upon learning this, Lincoln decides to make a run for it. Stopping only long enough to grab his closest friend, Jordan Two Delta (Johansson) who just today was scheduled to leave for the "island", he manages to escape. The rest of the film is their race for freedom.
While the first act of the movie poses some interesting moral questions, the final two-thirds never answers them and will be more enjoyable if you don't question anything, as one action sequence follows another. There are futuristic car chases, innumerable explosions and even a shootout on the side of a skyscraper, all carried out with director Bay's trademark flair for excess.
Grounding the story and keeping you with it are McGregor and Johansson, both serious actors. Their wide-eyed innocence and desperate fight for survival in the middle of all the action helps keep it plausible and forces you to care about their characters. They both manage to keep their heads above the water of action overkill, especially McGregor who gets to play an amusing sequence with himself when the clone meets his "sponsor". The two leads also get a humorous scene when they have sex for the first time, or as Lincoln puts it, "That tongue thing is so cool."
With the technology for cloning quickly becoming a reality and the controversy over stem cell research a current topic, there was plenty of room for this movie to make a statement, but it never does. And maybe I'm expecting too much from a summer action movie directed by Michael Bay, but a few less explosions and a little more weight to the subject matter could have turned an action flick into a Sci-Fi classic.
