Review of The Island (2005) by Mark L — 24 May 2011

Great story and some good acting highlight this otherwise fairly typical sci-fi actioner. The action scenes are huge, but overtly unbelievable and watching Scarlett Johansson fall off a skyscraper on a massive electric sign into a scaffolding below and emerge literally without a single scratch goes a long way to losing you in the shuffle.

The world Bay creates for this story is nearly identical in a lot of ways to the world Spielberg created for Minority Report, only, you know, Spielberg did it better. This movie came out the same year as the novel Never Let Me Go from Japan, making it hard to pinpoint exactly who ripped who off, with both stories being so close (Never Let Me Go is a better representation of it) coincidence is just too farfetched to be believable. Still the idea is great and The Island could've been much worse, especially considering that it came from Michael Bay, master of films of thug headed mentality.