The Island

Scarlett: YOU!  Ewan: Who, me?

WARNING: TOTAL MASSIVE SPOILERS

WHAT DOES BIG BROTHER WANT?  Big Brother wants to provide wealthy people with the means to live longer.
WHAT DOES THE REBEL WANT?  The rebel, as it happens, also wants to live longer.  This is contrary to Big Brother’s plans.
WHAT DOES THE REBEL GET?  This is a very expensive movie.  The rebel must not merely succeed in achieving longer life; he must also free all the other oppressed people.
IS THERE AN UPPER CLASS IN THIS DYSTOPIA, AND DO THEY HAVE ANY FUN?  There is and they do, which is kind of why the story exists in the first place.
DOES SOCIETY CHANGE AS A RESULT OF THE REBEL’S ACTIONS?  Totally and unequivocably.  Like I say, this is a very expensive movie; failure is not an option.

NOTES: There is much to recommend this movie, which in many regards is a hugely sophisticated piece of filmmaking.  The production design is complex, sleek and elegant, the direction is fluid, unfussy and direct and the big action setpieces are flabbergasting.  There’s an extended sequence in Act 2 that encompasses a footrace, a series of car crashes, a highway chase, flying motorcycles, an airborne helicopter pursuit through futuristic city streets, a dive through a skyscraper and a delirious plunge down the other side.  The vision of the near-future is credible, unique and detailed.  Loads of atmosphere.  In Act 3 there’s some wonderful acting when Ewan McGregor meets himself.  It’s short on character but stops short of becoming shallow.

It was also a notorious bomb last year (reported production budget: $126 million, domestic gross $36 million) and while there is a lot to like about it I can kind of see why it failed.

First there’s the title, which does not inspire excitement and which is says nothing about the movie.  It would have been better to call it Clones on the Run, because it works pretty well on that level.  Second, there’s something a little fuzzy about the concept, which I can’t discuss without spoiling the narrative, so read no further if you dislike having your movies spoiled.

Ewanand Scarlett are clones, raised in an underground clone city amid a whole big society of clones.  None of the clones know they’re clones; they all think they’re survivors of a ruined planet and are lucky to have any life at all.  This underground society of clones exists because they’re part of a business run by evil Dr. Merrick, who clones rich people for a lot of money so that they can have organs to replace theirs as they get older.  When a rich person in the outer world becomes ill, their clone must be sacrificed.  Dr. Merrick deals with this inevitability by inventing the contrivance of The Lottery, wherin, from time to time, a lucky clone will be selected to go to live on “The Island,” which is supposedly the last uncontaminated spot on the face of the Earth.  Hence the title.

Ewan discovers one day that the world is, in fact, not ruined, and that the clones selected to go to “The Island” are, in fact, carved up like meat for their organs and tossed away.  His gf Scarlett is scheduled to be sent to The Island that very afternoon, so he grabs her and the two of them escape out into the world, in order to seek their “sponsors” (ie the people they are clones of) and get some answers for why things are the way they are.  This is all very upsetting to evil Dr. Merrick, because, see, in spite of all his money, it’s apparently illegal to create living, breathing, feeling, thinking human beings and then slaughter them. 

Eventually Ewan and Scarlett get what they’re looking for, but that’s not good enough for Ewan, who decides in a rushed fourth act that it’s not good enough to merely get out of the underground clone city with his life and a sexy babe, he must also return to the underground clone city and free everyone who’s imprisoned there.

Here’s the problem as I see it:

Our society has no underground cities full of unjustly imprisoned clones yearning to breathe free.  It’s not really a problem that needs to be addressed at the moment.  There are no corporate giants creating clone societies and bending the rules about how those clones are raised.  I can see that such a world might exist in the time frame that the movie is talking about, but it doesn’t exist now.  And for some reason it’s hard to work up much feeling for the innocent clones because they actually have very pleasant lives where they live and eat and drink and dream and have jobs and clean clothes and good health.  Yes, they’re raised for slaughter but they seem to be taken pretty good care of up to that point.

For a narrative like this to function, it seems to me, there must be a strong, easily identified metaphor at work.  Clones as living, breathing spare-parts lockers doesn’t seem to be a metaphor for anything.  You could make the argument that they represent the way the rich consider it the poor’s duty to cook their food, take care of their children, fight their wars and die so that they might get on with their fabulous lives, and that’s a very good point to make, but the movie doesn’t present the issue as one of a class war.  It moves along at its swift, entertaining clip, showing us all the cool design, stunts and action it has in its bag, but doesn’t seem to stop to consider what it might actually be about.

There’s also the question of Dr. Merrick’s plan.  According to the narrative, he tells people that the clones are merely organs and stuff in a vegetative state somewhere.  But he has found that the organs fail if they’re not attached to an active brain.  So instead of apologising to his clients and giving them their money back, he builds a gigantic underground clone society, complete with skyscraper-sized buildings, sophisticated holograph projections to convince the clones they’re in a magical paradise, a complicated backstory that has to be taught and reinforced at every turn, and a massive staff to take care of all this.  Yet with this enormous construction project and the tens of thousands of workers it would take to build and maintain it, word has never gotten out that Dr. Merrick has perhaps bent the rules on the “vegetative clones” thing.  That calls for extremely tight security, yet Ewan manages to climb up a ladder and into a forbidden level with no trouble at all.

Maybe the problem lies in the bifurcated nature of the movie.  The first half is a sci-fi epic and the second half is an action epic, but once the Big Reveal has been revealed, the movie’s store of Big Ideas has been depleted and it must rely on adrenaline and heroics (both of which the director excels at) to get to the finish line.  It seems that if you want to make a movie where It Turns Out They’re All Clones, that has to be the end of Act II (of three), not the end of the Act I (of four).  (Another problem is that The Island has four distinct acts — the second two feel more like a sequel to the first two, not a continuation of it.)