Guy Davis
In 2005, a story of young people confined to a controlled environment who learned the cruel, tragic secret that dictated the course of their lives and indeed defined their very existence was released to overwhelming critical acclaim.
I’m of course talking about Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go. Oh, and Michael Bay’s The Island also hit cinemas that same year.
The brief description applies to both works, although in the case of Bay’s movie we could perhaps excise that last part. Looking at the Metacritic breakdown of critics’ reviews for The Island two decades down the line, it has a 50% ‘metascore’, earning it a ‘mixed or average’ rating. This would appear to be par for the course for Bay – while he has become a brand unto himself (Bayhem!) in a 30-year big-screen career and garnered a mixed response of genuine appreciation and grudging respect for his frenetic, kinetic style of filmmaking and storytelling, one could never convincingly call him the critics’ choice.
Now it’s hard to imagine Bay – who in addition to being one of the most commercially successful filmmakers of the 21st century, with two of his Transformers sequels raking in more than a billion dollars each worldwide, generally comes across as a rather confident chap – weeping himself to sleep over a few column inches excoriating his penchant for stereotypes, tin ear for humor or general artistic tendency to move fast and break stuff (nothing wrong with that last one, may I add).
But it’s not too much of a stretch to consider that Bay may want to stretch, to show audiences, colleagues and even himself that he had more to offer than lovingly composed hero shots and energetically choreographed chaos sequences – that he could graft Bayhem onto a story that also required moral complexity and emotional heft. Did he achieve this with The Island, coming hot on the heels of Pearl Harbor and Bad Boys II? Given that the sleek sci-fi dystopia drama is something of an afterthought in any examination of Bay’s body of work, no, not really.
But the earnest effort to do so, and the strange tension that results from that effort, is what makes The Island interesting – even if it is regularly lumped in with such semi-forgotten sci-fi of the pre-IP/franchise 2000s as The Sixth Day or Paycheck, stories set in a nebulous place and time, a futuristic society that could be a day or a decade away.
Bay’s a muscular filmmaker but his musculature is gym-built rather than labor-earned, and it’s not quite up to the task of the heavy lifting The Island requires to make an impression as a harrowing human drama. It is, however, up to the task of placing gorgeous lead characters Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson in peril and putting them through their paces in planes, trains and automobiles while ruthless retrieval expert Djimon Hounsou bellows “GO GO GO” to his manhunter squad in hot pursuit.
So what’s The Island about? Expanding on that initial plot synopsis, it takes place in a secluded compound that’s half brutalist bunker, half Apple Store and that houses the last survivors of an ecological collapse that rendered the outside world uninhabitable. It’s a sterile environment of regiment and routine, albeit with the occasional break for high-tech virtual-reality MMA (brought to you by Xbox!) between compound residents Jordan Two Delta (Johansson, in that liminal space between Lost in Translation and Black Widow) and Lincoln Six Echo (McGregor, his tenure as Obi-Wan coming to a close). It’s a throwdown that doubles as a love scene between the flirtatious pair.
Like many of her comrades, Jordan has bought into the story spun by compound overseer Merrick (Sean Bean) and is grateful for shelter and sustenance, and kept in line by the promise of being relocated to “the world’s last remaining paradise” – the tropical island of the title. Lincoln, however, has that skeptical, rebellious streak we want from our anti-authoritarian hero – not only does he rail against the bland oatmeal he’s fed and the impractical white outfit he’s given to wear, he’s having dreams of a world that don’t jibe with any experience he’s ever had.
Naturally he’s gonna stick his nose where he shouldn’t, and a little trespassing makes the compound’s true raison d’etre horrifyingly clear: anyone wins the weekly lottery doesn’t go to the island but ends up on an operating table, their organs harvested for use by their ‘sponsor’ – the original version of themselves.
Yep, Lincoln, Jordan, and everyone else is a clone, and they exist solely as replacement parts for the unhealthy wealthy. And with Jordan the latest winner of the island lottery, Lincoln stages a daring breakout to escape their fate and expose the truth.
Maybe even more so than in 2005, The Island’s premise of the average person being little more than a surplus unit with fuck-all agency and no purpose beyond keeping some rich dick alive another 24 hours hits home hard. The sheer indignity and injustice of it all is brought vividly to life in perhaps the best scene of the movie’s first half, in which the reality of the situation becomes all too clear to Starkweather Two Delta (the late Michael Clarke Duncan) when, believing he’s island-bound, he awakens during heart-removal surgery and attempts an escape.
Firstly, did any big guy convey fear as expressively as MCD? But more importantly, it depicts the pain of realising that you’re a disposable pawn in a rigged game, that you’re created solely to give of yourself until you have nothing left to contribute.
The Island has this concept in its bones, and McGregor and Johansson do what they can to convey it through their protagonists’ actions and reactions, but Bay can only really use it (or only really seems interested in using it) as motivation to get Lincoln and Jordan out of the compound and into the real world, where they seek to track down their sponsors while being hunted by Hounsou’s mercenary Laurent.
It’s not so much heartbreaking revelation or existential devastation as the next step in a sequence that’ll enable our characters to enter spaces and scenarios where they can get behind the wheel of fast-moving vehicles or dangle dangerously from the sides of skyscrapers. Still, if you’re Michael Bay, that could well have been the plan all along. He has his strengths, and any piercing rumination on life’s unfairness or inequities…well, that’s probably best left to Ishiguro.
“The Island” is streaming on Kanopy and available for digital rental or purchase.
