Review of The Island (2005) by Markb. — 21 Jan 2006

America's Most Obnoxious Director tries something different with this trite, contrived and unconvincing sci-fi film, and as a result gives us two bad movies for the price of one. The first hour is a futuristic fantasy about a highly structured, repressed society of slaves, drones and worker bees held in check not only because the system they work under is all they've known, but also by the promise of winning a daily lottery whose prize is supposedly a permanent retirement on an idyllic island but is in reality.

..well, a permanent retirement, anyway. This will prove shocking and illuminating only to those who have never seen Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Logan's Run or any of hundreds of other bad-new-world films; forget that some of the people involved with the obscure B-movie Parts: The Clonus Horror took the moviemakers to court, I saw the whole lottery premise played out on a decade-plus-old rerun of Sliders on DVD not long ago! Lack of originality is, of course, not a mortal sin, but mind-numbing idiocy is: this is the kind of movie that in order to work requires that not one but two major characters stumble across a highly elaborate, sophisticated security system in order to see Things They're Not Supposed To See, else you don't have a movie; the most effective and powerful lesson the film teaches is one that all non-homeschooled sixth graders already know, namely, if you're really nice to the cafeteria lady you get extra treats.

Once our heroes (Evan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson) discover the big secret and the chase is underway, director Michael Bay (The Rock, Bad Boys, Bad Boys 2) stops sucking in his gut and reverts to just plain sucking as usual, giving us plenty of everything we love to hate him for once again: loud, irritating noise, an almost gleeful heartlessness toward innocents caught in the crossfire and their property, self-referential humor that isn't funny, promiscuous use of product placement that's truly corrupt both in number and inappropriateness, criminal misuse of Steve Buscemi, and the editorial philosophy of why settle for one shot when 32 will do even better? (As always, Bay cuts his own throat with the latter; a potentially spectacular stunt involving an armored truck doing a 360-degree flip is robbed of all effectiveness because Bay shoots it from several different angles and insists on showing them all to us.

) Some people have praised Bay for having te self-discipline to not revert to his most irritating trademark techniques until almost halfway through the movie; to me, this is like praising an infant because he went for an hour WITHOUT soiling his diaper before finally doing so.

Acting is mediocre or nonexistent with one exception: Ethan Phillips is actually quite touching as a drone who never wins the lottery and doesn't realize how lucky he is; McGregor gives a performance as dull as his vocal turns in Robots and Valiant while the sublime Johansson (Lost in Translation, Match Point) not only does her first very bad work but is photographed and costumed to look like Tara Reid.

That's unforgivable...