The Island was the first Michael Bay movie I ever saw in theaters. This was more due to having a summer job at a theater, with free access to movies and nothing better to do with my time. It was released the same week as Richard Linklater’s remake of Bad News Bears, another case where I remember going to see the movie more than I remember anything actually in it.
And it’s at this point in our project where I already have to amend the previous entry. Bad Boys II wasn’t the turning point for Michael Bay. Bad Boys II may have been Bay venting his frustrations over Pearl Harbor, but it was still very much Bay pushing himself to be the most Bay he possibly could be. He had Jerry Bruckheimer in his corner for what would be their last film together. Bay’s deal with Disney was over, and with Bruckheimer staying in the Disney business (the first Pirates of the Caribbean came out a couple weeks ahead of Bad Boys II), Bay hitched his wagon to Dreamworks and Steven Spielberg. Spielberg tapped him to direct The Island based on his earlier work, which sounds to me like Spielberg finally saw the guy trying so hard to ride his coattails and said “let me help you with that”.
The Island is the real turning point in Bay’s filmography. Working with a different studio looking to capitalize on changing tastes in science fiction, and addressing more modern issues like surveillance states and designer healthcare, Bay’s shooting style finally calcified into the Michael Bay we all know today. The second half of this movie is full-tilt “Bayhem” at its most abrasive, with human bodies dwarfed by moving machine parts, explosions and shrapnel flying every which way. It’s a full-on cacophony of nonsense. But The Island is also so clearly a pastiche of half a dozen other sci-fi stories that the final result comes across as completely faceless. This is one of those movies where you could guess 90% of the plot sight unseen.
Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) and Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson) are two residents of a sanitized, structured society in the farflung, distant future of 2019. Their lives are heavily regimented, their jobs simplistic but demanding, and their diets closely monitored. And every once in a while, one lucky resident gets chosen by lottery to retire from this indoor community to a place known only as The Island, a tropical paradise untouched and uncontaminated by the vaguely defined calamity that destroyed society.
Lincoln explores the spaces underneath the facility, often interacting with an engineer named Mac (Armageddon‘s Steve Buscemi), who he thinks is some kind of dirty underling in their society. Mac hints to him that none of this is the case, but isn’t allowed to actually tell him what’s what. On one of his little explorations, Lincoln stumbles upon the awful truth: They’re actually in a giant medical lab, where the lottery winners are taken away to have their organs harvested. He witnesses one such person (Armageddon‘s Michael Clarke Duncan) attempting to flee after waking up mid-operation in an extremely upsetting sequence. Lincoln tries to return to the facility and act like nothing happened, but when Jordan wins the next lottery, he immediately sets about escaping with her.
There are shades of George Lucas’ THX-1138 and Logan’s Run to the plot, with the lion’s share of the film resembling MST3K favorite Parts: The Clonus Horror. In fact, the film echoed parts of Parts so closely, that Dreamworks got sued by the creators of that film, ultimately settling out of court for a seven-figure sum.
Now I’m not casting any blame on anyone in particular for this. Still, it’s worth noting that The Island‘s script is partly attributed to screenwriting duo Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who will go on to write the first two Transformers movies for Michael Bay. The best I can say for their talents as screenwriters is that, in this instance, it’s mostly invisible. Lincoln and Jordan are written as having a childlike curiosity about the world, but in the few scenes where this is evident, it’s played as awkward cringe comedy. McGregor and Johansson escape the facility and head to a biker bar in the middle of the desert, where they do a bunch of unfunny schtick while the bartender (Armageddon‘s Chris Ellis) looks on like a deer in headlights. This is also apparently the point in the film where Orci and Kurtzman took over the script, because after a mid-film infodump from Mac, The Island veers into critiquing the healthcare industry and never really comes back.
Turns out Lincoln and Jordan are clones, grown for the sole purpose of providing their turbo-rich sponsors with a spare set of organs. They track down the original Lincoln, where Ewan McGregor gets to play a handful of scenes against himself using two different accents. It’s kind of fun, but it’s also the point in the film where they realized the story didn’t have anywhere left to go. After a long and complicated sequence of events that ends in Djimon Hounsou shooting the real Lincoln and thinking he’s the clone, Clone Lincoln decides the only thing left to do is expose the facility to the world and set the remaining residents free. Incidentally, this not unlike the animated Robots, the other 2005 Ewan McGregor film decrying the evils of the healthcare industry.
I wish The Island had leaned into this stuff more, maybe shown us more consequences of the clones escaping into the real world, but the film simply doesn’t have that kind of imagination. Orci and Kurtzman set the table, and then Bay swoops in with a handful of increasingly obnoxious action sequences. He even borrows part of the freeway chase from Bad Boys II and has Lincoln push a bunch of heavy machinery off the back of a moving trailer. (This sequence will get recycled again in at least one of the Transformers sequels, with one particular shot explicitly repurposed.)
So there’s a big shootout back at the facility as Lincoln and Jordan confront the head of the program, Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean), which ends in the bowels of the compound, with giant whirring fan blades, sparks going everywhere and Lincoln and Merrick hanging from rafters. It’s all tragically dull for such a big, bombastic summer movie, but it looks distinctly like every single shot in Michael Bay’s next three movies. It was at this point in the film when a chill went down my spine, as I realized the rest of this project was 100% going to be more of this. God help me.
In fact, that’s the only thing that makes The Island interesting in the slightest. With this film, the Bay machine is well and truly in place. He’s working with Steven Spielberg and Dreamworks. He’s got Orci and Kurtzman on script duty, Steve Jablonsky on deck to compose the score. The style is locked in and the stage is set for Bay to finally take the summer blockbuster to the next level. Is that a place we wanted to go? Maybe, maybe not. But one way or another, a new era is about to begin.
NEXT TIME: *long exasperated sigh* It’s Transformers.
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