The Island
A childish The Matrix/I, Robot, directed by Michael Bay. Who the fuck wrote this, a 15 year old teenage boy? checks Oh, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, yikes! At least in the grimdark future, you can ride a public maglev from Arizona to LA, thanks Elon!
They live in a kind of 1984 repressive environment, where no sex is allowed, but woman get pregnant somehow. Since this was written by geeks and directed by a juvenile dweeb, it’s Harry Potter all over again, the genders are strictly segregated, and homosexuality doesn’t exist.
Homosexuality is so non-existent, there’s the scene in the bathroom where Steve Buscemi in funny print comically large boxers is pinned against the wall, but whispers “Get your hands off me! Let me pull my pants up and let’s get back to my place where we can be alone”. Seriously, what kind of boxers are those, it’s like a cocktail dress under those jeans.
In fact, Buscemi’s character is so not-gay, he even has a wife he hates, the girl from Saw in a single scene, just to clarify the sexual orientation of our Virgil character.
When the clones are growing mentally, they look like a more extreme version of David Webb, The Bourne Identity brainwashing.
The tech company fails to use their tech controls, then hires ex-special forces dudes to track the runaways on foot, even though they fled to the nearest federal highway. But the tracker guys don’t give a shit, and sweep desert for electromagnetic transmissions, even though it’s flat as a pancake and they are on a helicopter! Plus, there’s a trucker bar 10 miles from the facility, but nobody even searches there.
The least bad scene is at the bar where the film temporarily switches to language based comedy (what’s up?). Just for a scene, then it’s back to un-woke gay “jokes” and incredibly sexist shit. The worst scene has got to be the sendup to a freaking Nazi gas chamber, where the SS are absolute sociopaths that can murder dozens at a time without remorse. They don’t even die, the cavalry arrives just in time. The script is pure, unbridled dross.
You can tell this is fiction, the US congress passed eugenics laws in 2015, the final year of the last Obama term. As if Mitch McConnell would pass any bill for Obama to sign… In this alternate future of 2019, human cloning is perfected and there’s no sign of Trump in the White House.
What’s not fiction is that product placement, comes in industrial amounts. Microsoft got the leads playing some kind of Kinect game using the old green X logo (long abandoned), and MSN Search (a laughing stock, and equally available now).
One of the stupidest features of that souped up payphone is any dude with a credit card saying the name of a massive celebrity whose face is plastered on billboards can get a direct video feed to her living room, no questions asked. It’s like Cameo on steroids! Radical Transparency, or a miserable update of an older scene with a phone book?
The alternate future outside the facility is probably fascism anyway: McCord is literally murdered in broad daylight in the train station, but the LA train still ran on time. LAPD which has helicopters, MRAP, and V8 police cruisers is shot at, two of their members suffer vehicular manslaughter, but they take it on the chin! Black Wasps firing machine guns in heavy traffic are also common sights.
The most ironic scene is when Map-To-The-Stars Eddie buys a map of LA. The Sendero Luminoso has yet to conquer these parts.
Not gonna lie, 15 years-old me loved this film, but I was dumb and ignorant. My perception that this is Michael Bay’s best film remains unchanged.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.