When does homage become pastiche,
and pastiche deteriorate into outright plagiarism?
The idea of a lottery gone horribly wrong, as it does in The Island, certainly isn't an original
one. Author Shirley Jackson first addressed that much covered ground in her appropriately titled 1948
short story, "The Lottery."
And the Logan-Lincoln, Jessica-Jordan counterpoint of our
protagonists, along with the concept of the "false Paradise"
notwithstanding, isn't The Island
really a non-too-subtle send-up of Logan's
Run, but without the '70s hallucinogenic sex orgies? (There is one
lovemaking scene in The Island, but
it is mercifully brief.)
It is 2019 and Ewan McGregor plays Lincoln Six-Echo, a
resident of a fastidiously controlled--and monitored--environment that's some
kind of antiseptic, Orwellian dystopia awash in the brightest possible
saturation of white.
The facility is hermetically sealed from an outside world
that has been devastated by an un-named ecological catastrophe. Consequently,
its residents are Earth's only survivors. They all long to migrate to the Island, the only uncontaminated and habitable piece of
real estate left in the world, admission to which is determined by a recurring and
widely anticipated lottery.
Meanwhile, Lincoln is spending a lot of time, i.e. enough to
set off the facility's proximity alarms, with Jordan Two-Delta (Scarlett
Johansson) whose bee-stung lips are beginning to swell to terrifying, Melanie
Griffith proportions. She spouts hokey lines with overly rehearsed,
not-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman innocence, like "I know you're lying because your
eyes don't smile."
While the audience may mistake the corn-fed dialogue for bad
acting, director Michael Bay (Armageddon,
Pearl Harbor) tries to assure us that it's
actually narrative shorthand for Something Is Wrong Here.
When Jordan
playfully tells Lincoln
to gird himself for another tiring workout that night, she isn't alluding to any steamy boudoir action, but a virtual,
full-body, Xbox-powered boxing match that they face off in later. To make sure
the audience gets it, the wide-eyed guilelessness of the facility's residents is
hammered home when we're shown a classroom full of grown men and women reciting
lines from their Dick and Jane
readers in unison.
With Lincoln,
McGregor reproduces that same adolescent naivete he portrayed in Moulin Rouge! and
as the faux astronaut Zip Martin in Down
With Love. It's a little bit forced here but McGregor gets away, just
barely, with his callow youth performance. His character begins to question the
nature of the facility. At the same time, Lincoln
doesn't know why he's having the same recurring nightmare and he shares his
insecurities with the facility's resident doc, Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean).
Now if this was an M. Night Shyamalan movie, this is where
I'd be obliged to stop. But since "the twist" has been widely publicized as the
actual premise of the movie, I don't think I'd be violating any movie reviewer
code of honor when I tell you that Lincoln and Jordan soon discover that--big
surprise--there is no Island. ("Jessica,
the Carousel is a lie! There is no
Renewal!")
Lincoln's
worldview explodes when he learns that he and the other "survivors" are really clones
of people in a non-devastated, uncontaminated world, bred for the harvesting of
organs. In one of the picture's more brilliant scenes, Lincoln watches in
horror as the most recent lottery winner, played with nebbish aplomb by Michael
Clarke Duncan in an all-too-brief performance, is treated no more kindly than a
farm-fresh slab of meat in a slaughterhouse.
Steve Buscemi plays McCord, a facility worker who grudgingly
helps Lincoln and Jordan after they break out from the facility. His character
is the only one who seems even remotely fleshed out beyond a cardboard
construct. When the protagonists express interest in meeting their sponsors,
McCord, with a jaded weariness says, "Just because I'm eating a hamburger,
doesn't mean I want to meet the cow." It's one of the few comedic moments in
the picture, and one where we can feel genuine human pathos.
While our inchoate Adam and Eve are trying to parse their
brave new milieu, they're also being pursued by a rogue security squad led by a
former French special forces soldier (played by Djimon Houson)--a man, as the
saying goes, with a troubled past and nothing to lose.
Dr. Merrick (of Merrick Biotech) did a bad thing, you
see--his so-called "agnates" were never meant to be in anything other than a
persistent, vegetative state, and certainly not gadding about downtown Los
Angeles having "meta" moments with their Calvin Klein ads. It is at this point
that the movie suddenly switches gears and devolves into just another shoot-em-up
with a Hollywood blockbuster budget.
The visuals and stunts certainly dazzle, and there are
plenty of impressive explosions to keep the boys in the audience happy. I must confess,
however, that one of the climatic chase scenes had me fumbling in my purse for
the Dramamine, feeling just a little bit duped. Yet I suspect that was Michael Bay's entire intent.
Scarlett Johansson is like a lost lamb in this movie. She
fails to express the emotional range she executed so effortlessly in Lost in Translation and even that
narcoleptic clunker Girl with a Pearl Earring. Instead, Jordan vacillates between childlike
bemusement and childlike trepidation, merely registering, and not reacting to,
the chaos on the screen.
One of the rare times she shows the blush of warmth is when
she and Lincoln explore each other's bodies like curious 13-year-olds whose
parents are out of town for the weekend. This happens despite the fact that the
clones have had their sex drives bred out of them, which only goes to show that
nothing can stand in the way of the noble human pursuit of nookie.
Good science fiction stories are basically cautionary tales
which plum hidden depths of the human psyche. If all science fiction is based
on the premise of the "what if," then Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" is really
denouncing that dangers of capitalist hegemony. Logan's Run was really about '60s youth
counterculture and challenging authority. As Michael Bay
himself readily admits, all he wants audiences to do is to walk out of The Island deliberating if they'll ever
clone themselves. The Island may
recall Terri Schiavo and the current stem cell debate, but Bay doesn't want you
to think beyond the obvious.
Somewhere in the third act, Dr. Merrick, while defending his
actions, protests that the clones "have no soul." Unfortunately, neither does
the movie he's in.
(The Island
opens July 22. Running time: 127 minutes, PG-13.)
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