Tuesday afternoon Amy had informed me that her brother had procured two tickets to an advanced screening of The Island in Pasadena.. Amy had been looking forward to seeing this movie for quite some time because of the Ewen McGregor factor. I thought it looked interesting, but didn’t/don’t trust Michael Bay.

When I got home from work last night Amy surprised me with a giant pizza. It was an 18-inch pizza from Costco. Everything seemed good so far (except my sunburn still had me in quite a bit of pain). We got to the Pacifica Paseo theater about fifty minutes before the start time and were told to go stand in line. After about twenty minutes they started letting people in. We had come early enough to get not the best seats in the house, but not that bad. Amy has had a hankering for movie popcorn lately, so I went out and got her some popcorn. We both agreed it was not as good as AMC popcorn, and the extra “butter” just tasted like vegetable oil.

The movie started ten minutes later than its stated time, but there were no coke commercials or previews.

And now…. the movie review

The Island will be lucky if it gets one star from Ebert. The movie starts out with everyone living in a concrete “city” shaped a lot like the Westin Bonaventure that appears to be built just off the coast of somewhere nice and sunny. Every clone wears white jumpsuits and is watched over by cameras and men in black jumpsuits. Now, already you are saying “THX 1138.” The comparisons to that and many other movies of the Big Brother type are too numerous to name. They even copy THX-1138 right down to a “proximity warning” restricting L6E and his galpal from hooking up. Before we even notice this however we begin the product placement bombardment. At least in Minority Report they made an excuse for the ads…here we just have camera close-ups on products before the characters use them. Before we see this concrete black and white society we watch Lincoln 6 Echo wake up and get dressed in a white jumpsuit and …Pumas. Later we’ll see close-ups of Michelob Light, Aquafina, Cadillac, Calvin Klein (or was it Chanel?), MSN search, X-Box, etc.

Speaking of automobiles, one thing I hate about future movies is how the “cars” of the future (in movies taking place no more than 30 years hence) are just cars of today with plastic cladding. The 1989 ford probes driving around Hill Valley with bike ramps glued to their hoods in Back to the Future part two come to mind. Last years sci-fi movie I, Robot featured a gambit of Audis with cladding. Michael Bay doesn’t bother with any of that silly body cladding. On “city” scenes in downtown Los Angeles in the year 2019 we see (model year 2005/06) Land Rovers, Lexus SC430s, Mazda RX-8s, Honda Elements, Chrysler 300Ms, Pontiac Vibes, Hummer H3s and various other large SUVs, Cadillac CTSs (the taxi cabs of the future) and more. Apparently at the end of this year the government will outlaw the redesign of any automobile that isn’t an exotic as we DO see one or two supercar looking future things wizzing by once in a while but they are few and far between. Apparently in Michael Bay’s mind the Los Angeles police department is going to replace it’s squad of Crown Victorias in 2019 with 2005 Chrysler 300s. Even the squad of mercenaries (led by Djimon Honsou) hunting our heroes drives a gaggle of gray Dodge Magnums (but with a billet grill so it looks futuristic …or rice-boyish). Steve Buschemi even drives a dusty Chevrolet SSR. The coupe de gras though is the final chase scene with Lincoln (another product placement?) 6 Echo’s owner’s prize supercar. I recognized the car as soon as it came on screen being the car nut that I am. The car is/was a Cadillac v-12 supercar concept that is currently making the auto show circuit. The character in the film has to validate this by saying “you like it? It’s a 2009 Cadillac (I don’t remember the model name) with a V-12 that cost me $450,000.” Now wait a minute…what did a car cost in 1990? Are we to assume that the cost of supercars will not follow inflation over the next fifteen years? The Mercedes SLR Mclaren costs $450,000 RIGHT NOW! With all the money Michael Bay had to throw around on this movie why couldn’t he have just made digital cars on the streets? Almost everything else in the shots is digital; all the tall buildings downtown have additions on them, and magnetic tram lines loop around everything. Bay tries to swerve around the car issue by shooting every scene in the “real world” in a jerky quick-change style that doesn’t give you long to look at any one thing and gives you a headache after a few minutes.

You have to suspend your disbelief in this film more than any other of recent memory. Why are they shooting at people on the side of a building from helicopters if this project is a “secret?” Why did they shoot a guy and send him crashing into a glass shelf if the project is a “secret?” Why would the police just stop in the middle of an intersection at a red light in downtown Los Angeles? Why when the mercenary can’t figure out whom to kill (when L6E confronts his owner) doesn’t he just check the wrist since every clone is branded like a cow? Honsou’s character even notes the branding of the clones when he reveals his decision to (spoiler here that you saw coming a long time ago) help the clones escape at the end, yet he didn’t think to stop and look at both men’s wrists before he decided to kill one…or even in the scene afterwards when he thinks he is talking to the “real” Tom Lincoln and not the clone… How would a clone who never drove anything before be able to fly a jet-bike? Where did that map come from that the L6E and Jordan used to sneak back into the clone complex? It is said that Tom Lincoln “had lots of maps and drawings.” Why would Tom Lincoln know the floor plans of the cloning complex, much less draw the out in Illustrator, print them, and leave them on a table in his house? Better yet…how did they even get there, the cloning complex is in Arizona and they were in Los Angeles a minute ago. How could she get into the complex with a big metal gun in her crotch? Why are they taking her to surgery with her dirty street clothes on? I wouldn’t pay millions of dollars to have a company get me a new liver from a clone that wasn’t even cleaned up before surgery. How can Michael Clark Duncan have his chest cut open (“bone saw please…zzzzzzzzzzzcrack….clean up that blood drip please…..”) and then run down a hallway like Eddie George. Why does Sean Bean’s character tell Honsou’s character that the clones escaped four hours ago and Honsou tells his men to get in the choppers and start searching, yet we watch the clones fall asleep and wake up the next morning before the mercenary teams start searching for them? How is the government and military involved? Two scenes hint that the military is involved with the cloning but this is never satisfactorily explained. Most importantly – if you can grow a person in a matter of months and age them to a specific age just to harvest their organ/s, can’t you just grow their organ/s independently? Why would anyone pay to have a clone made to be a surrogate mother, when they could just have a test-tube baby? Why would they kill the surrogate mother afterwards….maybe the real mom will get in a car accident tomorrow and need a new liver like every other “sponser” in this movie. Liver failure is apparently the #1 cause of death in 2019.

The answer is- because making another clone is so cheap! We learn late in the picture that the cost of creating a human clone is five million dollars (keep in mind this is the year 2019). Does anyone else think that number is a little low? Especially since in the film the whole process is illegal. Speaking of which, this movie doesn’t come off as a good thing for science. It appears Michael Bay has sided with the religious right and even has one character tell the “doctor” controlling the cloning that he is trying to be God.

I’m a fan of long movies, but this thing gets tiring after the first few minutes and goes on for over two hours. The scenes in the “utopia” at the beginning are incredibly trite and derivative of everything from THX 1138 to Logan’s Run. Once we get out into the real world we hope the film will change direction, but once we see the stale “futuristic” Los Angeles our hopes come crashing down just like our heroes do from 80 floors up and walk away without a scratch after getting smashed by an exploding helicopter. The characters in this movie just seem to appear at their destinations without much explanation. They get from downtown LA to San Pedro by taking a cab. We only know this because we see a brief shot of the house with the cab outside. They get from Union Station to City Hall by…walking past a store window… They get to Arizona from San Pedro by…oh wait that is never explained. They get to Steve Buschemi’s place by…. walking to a bar on route 39 in the Arizona mid-day sun.

This movie had a very slapped together look. The characters got extremely boring after the first ten minutes and so did the plot. We’ve seen people in white jumpsuits escape before (THX 1138, Logan’s Run), we’ve seen people fight/confront their clones at their home (The 6th day), we’ve seen cars being flipped and destroyed on a vaguely SoCal looking freeway (done much better in Matrix Revolutions), we’ve seen people “drive” through an office building (Blues Brothers comes to mind – okay, I know it was a shopping mall but it was still more entertaining), we’ve seen people in cars getting shot at by marksmen in helicopters (almost any 1985-1995 action movie), we’ve seen huge walls of watery pods with people living/growing inside them (the Matrix again), we’ve seen “newbies” get made fun of at the local bar when they don’t understand slang (you could even go back as far as Starman to see these attempts at humor). Basically you’ve seen every single scene in this film in another film before, and in almost every single instance the other movie was better. We see no more of the future in this movie than you see in the previews, so I hope nobody goes to it for that reason. There is no major plot twist or surprise of any sort, so don’t expect that either. If you want to see a big dicey music video that doesn’t make you think (except about “I wonder how much longer this is going to be”), then go for it.