There are some hidden blessings of cloning adult humans that you might not have considered. Clones have better skin than the originals. Their organs aren't polluted from decades of fast food and exhaust. And you might get to see Ewan McGregor slug it out with his test-tube double during a high-speed car chase.
Yes, experimentation with human DNA is a political hot-button issue -- check out the stem-cell debate -- and a weighty one. But it also has all sorts of entertainment possibilities. There was Mini Me in Austin Powers, the multiple Michael Keatons in Multiplicity and now the self-serious The Island.
Michael Bay's film, at least at first, wanders tentatively toward substantial sci-fi, scratching at controversial ethical issues. What constitutes human experience? Where should science draw the line when it comes to creating life?
But by the time it's halfway through, The Island has us asking the same types of questions we always ask in Bay's movies. Did that car really just get sliced in two? What's the chance, realistically, of that shrapnel flying out the screen and splitting open my skull? Did Ewan McGregor get paid extra to smack his own self?
Those are valid mysteries to ponder, too. But scientists and sci-fi fans might feel a twinge of regret that The Island doesn't hew to its initial, promising trajectory.
At the beginning of the movie, Lincoln Six-Echo (McGregor, who we see in duplicate by film's end) and Jordan Two-Delta (Scarlett Johansson, who, alas, we don't) spend their days exercising, working and eating healthy food. Their every move, and bowel movement, is carefully monitored, la THX 1138.
Lincoln and Jordan, along with hundreds of their track-suited comrades, believe themselves to be survivors of a global environmental catastrophe. If they are lucky, they'll get a trip to "the island," the last uncontaminated place on Earth.
Lincoln, however, is in his "why" stage. He asks questions, begins poking around and soon realizes that everything he's been told is a lie. His gleaming city is actually a factory for clones. He and his friends are being cultivated for their organs.
So Lincoln and his buddy Jordan bust into the real world. That's a big mistake, not for Jordan and Lincoln (spoiler warning: Everything works out for them), but for the movie.
While it roams the factory, The Island is a mildly creepy, provocative piece of futuristic entertainment. Once it heads into open spaces, Bay's film degrades into a series of chase scenes. Worse, out in the bright sunshine (the clone factory, it turns out, is beneath the Arizona desert), the flaws in the movie's logic become glaringly obvious.
There's no room to detail even a fraction of The Island's implausibilities and inconsistencies, but I can't help listing a few: The freeways in Los Angeles are empty in the middle of the day. The $120-billion clone factory self-destructs if someone pulls a certain unprotected lever. And, circa 2019, Amtrak is still in business.
The Island has plenty of visual punch and disturbing imagery. We see how the harvesting process works. Full-grown adults, attached to mechanized placentas, gestate in embryonic plastic bags.
There are other nifty elements, too, like little brain-scanning robot bugs that enter their hosts through their eyelids. But other than the gadgets, Bay doesn't seem especially interested in the science behind the plot. He certainly doesn't care much for the medical profession.
His villain is a doctor more concerned with money than with the sanctity of life. In one chilling scene, a nurse gives a fatal injection to a clone and, expressionless, watches her die. And near the film's end, we see technicians slash open embryonic bags, viciously killing the unborn clones -- these are abortions of the most graphic kind.
But to suggest The Island is a politically motivated text might be assigning too much credit. This movie never seems sure what it wants to be. Waxing philosophical about the value of human life one moment, Bay explodes a few dozen vehicles the next. We don't see the bodies -- that would ruin the thrill.
Or maybe all those folks survived their vehicular fireballs. In one stupendously silly scene, Jordan and Lincoln fall from 70 stories high and land, unharmed, in a net at ground level. A man helps them up and tells them, "Jesus must love you."
So much for physics.
