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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Ewan McGregor runs off with this completely baffling futuristic film, undoubtedly one of the strangest mainstream pictures of the year.
Jul 22, 2005 | Early in the futuristic wangdoodle that goes by the name "The Island," an authority figure intones, "We have a product on the loose!" Unfortunately, so does Dreamworks. "The Island" is one of the strangest mainstream pictures of the year, although, sadly, not strange enough. It's a movie in which the actors all seem to be in on the joke every minute, but the director, Michael Bay, drifts in and out of it like an amnesia victim from a '40s melodrama. Is he making a social-issues parable, a "Candide"-like adventure about the corruption of innocents, a cautionary tale about the ethical limits of science, or an action vehicle in which his only real responsibility is to, as Billy Sol Hurok once said, blow stuff up real good? Bay can't remember what he's doing from one minute to the next, and when he loses the thread, he bulks up the movie with a pedestrian (if noisy) cat-and-mouse game that involves lots of crash-'em-ups and blammo fireworks, the realm he's most comfortable in.
Meanwhile, Ewan McGregor runs off with the movie on a very fast boat.
If you're confused, you've got nothing on me: I watched "The Island" with my jaw hanging like a squeaky "The Doctor Is IN" shingle. What the hell is this thing? It would be much easier to reckon with if it were wholly dismissible. But sometimes "The Island" works as high-toned sci-fi kitsch, and sometimes, even more inexplicably, it just works. In its silliest moments it has a sheen of preposterousness that's like a hard-candy coating. (You can't help but hoot when, early in the picture, two pregnant women clad in the white stretchy cycling outfits worn by all of these citizens of the future sidle up to one other, the better to stroke and admire each other's bumps. Has obstetric ominousness ever been writ so large?) "The Island" walks a weird, wobbly line between being stupid, falsely fattened-up entertainment and a picture that just might have possibly been made by a person with a brain -- a scrambled one, but a brain nonetheless.
So which is it? Damned if I know. The confusion begins as Ewan McGregor -- his character's name is Lincoln Six-Echo, which, much to your forehead-slapping chagrin, will make perfect sense to you by the end of the movie -- awakens in a gleaming white cube of a bedroom and has a pee. He has just had a nightmare involving a voluptuous blonde perched on the bow of speedboat that looks as if it were designed by Michael Graves: That would be Scarlett Johansson, and when she's not starring in Lincoln Six-Echo's nightmares, she's the magnificently groomed Jordan Two-Delta, another denizen of this nearly all-white futuristic Emerald City.
"The Island"
Directed by Michael Bay
Starring Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Sean Bean
Lincoln Six-Echo and Jordan Two-Delta live in a completely enclosed facility that's like a cross between the inside of a toaster oven and an overlit Southern California mall. After arising from their bleachy-clean sleep chambers, they ride in gleaming glass elevators to the cafeteria, where a cranky worker bee slaps the appropriately nutritional breakfast grub into their compartmentalized trays. (Each dweller in this "contained facility" wears an electronic bracelet that determines whether he or she is entitled to bacon or slimy green goo at breakfast time.) By day, the inhabitants of this carefully controlled environment do menial jobs, like injecting nutrients into vast networks of multicolored plastic tubing. By night, they're entertained with virtual-reality amusements and drink fluorescent nonalcoholic cocktails in a spare nightclubby environment that bears a marked resemblance to a Damien Hirst installation. Those who live in this facility have been told, by a very smart doctor played by Sean Bean, that they're very lucky to be there. They've all been rescued from the outside world which, after some unnamed catastrophe, has become so contaminated that it's uninhabitable. But on the "inside," these foundlings receive very special care. And all have been told that eventually, they'll win the "lottery" and be transported to "the Island," the last spot on Earth free of pathogens.
