The Island (2005 film)

The Island is a 2005 American science fiction thriller film directed and co-produced by Michael Bay. It stars Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Djimon Hounsou, Sean Bean, Michael Clarke Duncan and Steve Buscemi. The film is about Lincoln Six Echo (McGregor), who struggles to fit into the highly structured world in which he lives, isolated in a compound, and the series of events that unfold when he questions how truthful that world is. After Lincoln learns the compound inhabitants are clones used for organ harvesting as well as surrogates for wealthy people in the outside world, he attempts to escape with Jordan Two Delta (Johansson) and expose the illegal cloning movement.

The Island
Theatrical release poster
Directed byMichael Bay
Produced by
Screenplay by
Story byCaspian Tredwell-Owen
Starring
Music bySteve Jablonsky
CinematographyMauro Fiore
Edited by
Production
companies
Distributed byDreamWorks Distribution (North America)
Warner Bros. Pictures (International)[1]
Release date
  • July 22, 2005 (2005-07-22)
Running time
136 minutes[2]
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$126 million[3]
Box office$162.9 million[3]

The Island has been described as a pastiche of "escape-from-dystopia" science fiction films of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Fahrenheit 451, THX 1138, Parts: The Clonus Horror, and Logan's Run. The Island cost $126 million to produce. The original score was composed by Steve Jablonsky, who would go on to score Bay's further works. It opened on July 22, 2005 by DreamWorks Pictures in North America and internationally by Warner Bros. Pictures, to mixed reviews, earning $36 million at the United States box office and $127 million overseas for a $162 million worldwide total.

Plot

In 2019, Lincoln Six Echo and Jordan Two Delta live with others in an isolated compound. This dystopian[4] community is governed by a strict set of rules. The residents are told that the outside world has become too contaminated to support life with the exception of a pathogen-free island. Each week, one resident gets to leave the compound and live on the island by way of a lottery.

Lincoln begins having dreams that he knows are not from his own experiences. Dr. Merrick, a scientist who runs the compound, is concerned and places probes in Lincoln's body to monitor his cerebral activity. While secretly visiting an off-limits power facility in the basement where technician James McCord works, Lincoln discovers a live moth in a ventilation shaft, leading him to deduce the outside world is not really contaminated. Lincoln follows the moth to another section, where he discovers the "lottery" is actually a system to selectively remove inhabitants from the compound, where the "winner" is then used for organ harvesting, surrogate motherhood, and other important purposes for each one's wealthy sponsor, of whom they are clones.

Merrick learns Lincoln has discovered the truth, which forces Lincoln to escape. Meanwhile, Jordan has been selected for the island. Lincoln and Jordan escape the facility, and emerge in the desert. Lincoln explains the truth to her, and they set out to discover the real world. Merrick hires Burkinabé mercenary and former GIGN operative Albert Laurent to find and return them to the compound.

Lincoln and Jordan find McCord, who explains that all the facility residents are clones of wealthy sponsors, and are kept ignorant about the real world and conditioned to never question their environment or history. McCord provides the name of Lincoln's sponsor in Los Angeles, and helps them to the Yucca maglev station, where they board an Amtrak train to LA before mercenaries kill him. In New York City, Jordan's sponsor, model Sarah Jordan, is comatose following a car crash and requires transplants from Jordan to survive. Lincoln's sponsor, Tom Lincoln, gives Lincoln some explanation about the cloning institute, causing Lincoln to realize that he has gained Tom's memories. Tom agrees to help Lincoln and Jordan but, desperately in need of Lincoln's liver to survive due to his cirrhosis, secretly contacts Merrick, who sends Laurent and the mercenaries to their location. After a car chase through suburban LA, Lincoln tricks Laurent into shooting Tom, allowing him to assume Tom's identity.

Merrick surmises that a cloning defect was responsible for Lincoln's memories and behavior, resulting in him and every future clone generation to question their environment and even tap into their sponsor's memories. To prevent this, he decides to eliminate the four newest generations of clones. Lincoln and Jordan, however, plan to liberate the other clones. Posing as Tom, Lincoln returns to the compound to destroy the holographic projectors that conceal the outside world. Jordan allows herself to be caught to assist Lincoln's plan. Laurent, who has moral qualms about the clones' treatment after witnessing their fight for survival and learning that Sarah Jordan may not survive even with the organ transplants, helps Jordan. Lincoln kills Merrick, and the clones are freed, seeing the outside world for the first time. Lincoln and Jordan sail away in a boat together toward the island, where all the clones were promised they would go.

Cast

Production

Filming
Ruins in Rhyolite, Nevada

Principal photography for The Island began on October 24, 2004.[5] The ruined buildings where Jordan and Lincoln sleep after leaving the subterranean compound are in Rhyolite, Nevada. The city parts were shot in Detroit, Michigan, with Michigan Central Station one of the notable locations.[6] Other portions of the film were shot in the Coachella Valley, California.[7]

Product placements

The computer in Merrick's office at the Institute, which features a large, tabletop touchscreen display capable of detecting several forms of input, was rumored to be a large version of Microsoft PixelSense. The design was actually proposed by a technology adviser at MIT, who aimed for the production of a believable vision of futuristic technology.[8]

Release
Director Michael Bay at the premiere of The Island on August 7, 2005

Box office

The Island grossed $12,409,070 in over 3,100 theaters its opening weekend. The film went on to gross $35,818,913 domestically and $127,130,251 in other markets, for a worldwide total of $162,949,164.[3]

Ultimately, the film was considered a box office bomb, which Edward Jay Epstein of Slate blamed on poor publicity. Epstein notes that research polls showed little awareness of The Island's impending release amongst its target audience and that trailers bore little relation to the film's plot. He writes, "What really failed here was not the directing, acting, or story (which were all acceptable for a summer movie) but the marketing campaign."[9]

Critical reception

The Island drew mixed reviews from critics.[10][11] On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 40%, with an average rating of 5.35 out of 10 based on reviews from 200 critics. The website's consensus calls the film "[a] clone of THX 1138, Coma, and Logan's Run" and describes it as "another loud and bombastic Michael Bay movie where explosions and chases matter more than characters, dialogue, or plot."[12] On Metacritic, the film received "mixed or average reviews," with a weighted average of 50 out of 100 based on 38 critics.[13]

Chicago Sun-Times' Roger Ebert said, "[the first half] is a spare, creepy science fiction parable, and then it shifts into a high-tech action picture. Both halves work. Whether they work together is a good question." Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and praised the performances of the actors, in particular Michael Clarke Duncan: "[He] has only three or four scenes, but they're of central importance, and he brings true horror to them." On the critical side, he said the film "never satisfactorily comes full circle" and missed the opportunity "to do what the best science fiction does, and use the future as a way to critique the present."[14]

Variety's Justin Chang called the film an "exercise in sensory overkill" and said that Bay took on "the weighty moral conundrums of human cloning, resolving them in a storm of bullets, car chases and more explosions than you can shake a syringe at." He noted McGregor and Buscemi as highlights of the film, along with Nigel Phelps' production design. Chang felt the story lacked in surprises and blamed "attention-deficit editing by Paul Rubell and Christian Wagner" for action sequences that he thought lacked tension and were "joltingly repetitive".[4]

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek also praised the actors but felt that when the film "[gets] really interesting, Bay thinks he needs to throw in a car crash or a round of gunfire to keep our attention." She felt the film had enough surprises "to make you wish it were better."[15] A.O. Scott of The New York Times' said "[the] film is smarter than you might expect, and at the same time dumber than it could be."[16]

Reviewers were critical of the excessive product placement in the film.[17][18][19]

The creators of the 1979 film Parts: The Clonus Horror, which was also about a colony that breeds clones to harvest organs for the elite, filed a copyright infringement suit in 2005.[20][21] DreamWorks attempted to have the suit dismissed but a federal judge determined that there was indeed a copyright infringement case to be heard and scheduled the case to go to trial in February 2007. However, DreamWorks then settled the case out of court in late 2006 for an undisclosed seven-figure sum.[22]

Michael Marshall Smith's 1996 novel Spares, in which the hero liberates intelligent clones from a "spare farm", was optioned by DreamWorks in the late 1990s, but was never made. It remains unclear if the story inspired The Island, and so Marshall Smith did not consider it worthwhile to pursue legal action over the similarities.[23]

References
  1. "The Island (2005)". British Film Institute. Retrieved February 20, 2018.
  2. "THE ISLAND (12A)". British Board of Film Classification. July 22, 2005. Retrieved January 18, 2016.
  3. "The Island". Box Office Mojo. Internet Movie Database. Retrieved October 11, 2020.
  4. Chang, Justin (July 10, 2005). "The Island". Variety.
  5. "The Island begins principal photography". MichaelBay.com. 2004. Retrieved July 30, 2018.
  6. "Filming locations for The Island (2005)". Internet Movie Database. 1990–2012. Retrieved August 16, 2012.
  7. Palm Springs Visitors Center. "Coachella Valley Feature Film Production 1920–2011". Filming in Palm Springs. Palm Springs, CA. Archived from the original on March 5, 2016. Retrieved October 1, 2012. ♦ Download (Downloadable PDF file)
  8. LONG ZHENG (June 21, 2007). "Correction: "The Island" did NOT feature a Surface". I Started Something. WordPress 3.4.1. Retrieved August 16, 2012.
  9. Epstein, Edward (February 6, 2006). "The End of Originality: Or, why Michael Bay's The Island failed at the box office". Slate. Retrieved April 8, 2011.
  10. Weintraub, Steve (June 18, 2007). "Michael Bay Interview – TRANSFORMERS". Collider. Archived from the original on February 21, 2018. Retrieved February 21, 2018.
  11. Dellamorte, Andre (June 29, 2011). "THE ISLAND Blu-ray Review". Collider. Archived from the original on February 21, 2018. Retrieved February 21, 2018.
  12. "The Island (2004)". Rotten Tomatoes. Archived from the original on February 21, 2018. Retrieved July 8, 2019.
  13. "The Island". Metacritic. Archived from the original on January 6, 2018. Retrieved April 8, 2011.
  14. Ebert, Roger (July 22, 2005). "The Island". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved April 8, 2011.
  15. Zacharek, Stephanie (July 22, 2005). "The Island". Salon. Retrieved April 8, 2011.
  16. Scott, A. O. (July 22, 2005). "No Soul, Perhaps, but This Clone Has a Skeptic's Heart". The New York Times. Retrieved April 8, 2011.
  17. Ali (August 13, 2005). "Review: The Island". TheShiznit.co.uk. Retrieved July 31, 2012.
  18. Movie Marketing Update (July 5, 2005). "Did Excessive Product Placement Help Sink 'The Island'?". Movie Marketing Update. The Movie Marketing Group. Archived from the original on May 9, 2015. Retrieved July 31, 2012.
  19. Michael Ferraro (July 25, 2005). "THE ISLAND". Film Threat. Hamster Stampede LLC. Retrieved July 31, 2012.
  20. "Copyright lawsuit claims 'The Island' cloned 'Parts: The Clonus Horror'". August 10, 2005. Retrieved June 6, 2007.
  21. "'Clonus' Producers File Suit". Satellite News. August 10, 2005. Archived from the original on March 24, 2007. Retrieved June 6, 2007.
  22. Interview with Bob Sullivan – Clonus screenwriter (May 17, 2007)
  23. Patrick Goss (August 9, 2009). "An interview with Michael Marshall Smith – the author of The Intruders, Only Forward and Spares". MSN. Archived from the original on July 22, 2012. Retrieved July 1, 2012.
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