If you’ve seen the trailer for The Island, you already know the bulk of the plot. Funny how Hollywood filmmakers seem to think audiences want to know the whole story (except for the final resolution, which is easily predictable anyway) before they go into the movie. But then such filmmakers are used to treating their audiences like idiots, and the trailer is just a sign of what is to come when you see The Island — the way it telegraphs its mysteries so insistently that by the time the answer comes it’s no surprise, the way it pauses every so often to fill in background that most of us will have worked out already, and so on. This is join-the-dots filmmaking that pretends to be helluva clever but really isn’t.
Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johannson play two future people with the intriguing names Lincoln Six Echo and Jordan Two Delta respectively. They live in a neat white world in which everything is provided for them and their every move controlled; there is even a shrink there to help them deal with their emotional problems. In Lincoln Six Echo’s case, such problems include an indefinable urge for something more than this sterile world can offer. It seems he wants more than comfort and security — he wants meaning!
Unfortunately, so do movie audiences, or at least I do. The Island doesn’t manage to provide much of that, despite its portentous air of making some kind of statement about utopias, freedom, the possible futures we face, and the whole issue of humanity playing God. In fact, all these issues are there to justify plot developments. The movie has nothing new or interesting to say about any of them.
Which is not surprising when you realise, as you watch the movie, how lacking in originality it is. Its ideas are stolen from all over the place, from Aldous Huxley’s seminal novel Brave New World to Coma,Blade Runner, THX 1138, and so on. Not whole ideas — just bits and bobs, fragments that are borrowed, leached of meaning and then collaged into what is essentially a chase movie with pretensions.
As you might have expected, Lincoln Six Echo and Jordan Two Delta discover that their world is not the utopia it seems, and that the former’s yearning for something more is justified. And then, with much pulsating music, the chase begins. It’s reasonably thrilling, as these things go, and the film looks good, as one might expect from a $100-million production. But that can’t disguise the lack of any real substance within, and one emerges from The Island with a distinct sense of pointlessness.
Run, viewer, run. Far away.