Movie: The Island

Is it possible to combine cerebral with action-packed adventure? That's what the movie The Island tries to do, and succeeds in making a long-ass, boring movie.

The basic concept is fascinating and deserving of exploration. Rich people are paying big money to clone themselves to harvest body parts for a longer life. They are told their clones are kept in stasis and never are conscious. What the administrators discovered however, was the only way to keep the clones (product--as they are called in the movie) viable is to allow them to have consciousness and to live their lives. The administrator created a controlled environment for them to thrive. They are programmed with childhood memories and told they are survivors of a global contamination and must stay within the enclosed community. There is only one place outside the underground city that is free from deadly contamination called the island. The winner of the on-going lottery will allow them to live the rest of their live on the tropical paradise.

This is all a lie, of course, the winner of the lottery is going to have their body parts harvested for their genetic look-alike who had them cloned to insure a longer life.

Naturally two of the clones find out about this and discover the outside world is not contaminated after all. They must be brought back into the fold and eliminated. Here come the long tedious chase scenes, car crashes, smashed buildings, the destruction goes on and on.

Yawn. There are three of these ad infinitum chase scenes and another boring sex scene without any real sex. Snore.

Rather than bore us with the same-ol' smash 'em up/tear it down; there were to aspects of the movie that needed exploring. The first was that as the clones became older (they were cloned at the same age of their adult payee, but were basically children) they started picking up more and more human attributes such as curiosity. What's more, they seemed to start knowing aspects of their DNA contributor's lives. The second was when the hero and heroine escape to the real world with adult bodies but the minds of children. Watching how they adapted from a confined, protected world to one where anything goes could have been very interesting and funny. No, we got cars flipping over instead.