DIRECTED BY Michael Bay
STARRING Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Sean Bean
US 2005 136 mins.
GIVE a billion chimps a billion typewriters, so they say, have them type into infinity and eventually, by random permutation, they’ll type out the complete works of Shakespeare. The first 45 minutes of The Island aren’t exactly Shakespeare, but they’re not bad. They might perhaps be Orwell or Aldous Huxley in dystopian sci-fi mode, or at least Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. There’s some promising stuff there. Alas, the chimps in charge of this show seem to have found these ideas by random typing, don’t know what to do with them and eventually move on to something else.
I knew something was wrong when the trailer divulged the film’s main twist; I mean, what kind of insecure would-be blockbuster feels the need to spoil its surprises in the trailer? The setting is a strange bubble-world where survivors of a never-seen apocalypse live their lives in oppressive, antiseptic surroundings, hoping to win the weekly lottery and go to “the Island”, the only pathogen-free zone in the outside world – and I may as well tell you (since the trailer already has) that in fact there is no Island, and in fact the inhabitants are clones of people in the outside world who’ve paid to create new versions of themselves, whether from vanity or necessity.
The doctor in charge (Sean Bean) tells “clients” that their clones are vegetables, so they don’t feel bad about harvesting organs or stripping new skin from lifelike humanoids – after all, he explains in one of the few witty lines, “Just because people want to eat the burger doesn’t mean they want to meet the cow”. In fact the clones are conscious, though only to the level of a (rather slow) 15-year-old: their vocabulary’s limited, their brains not fully grown, and libido not yet out in the open.
It’s tempting to see this as Hollywood-on-Hollywood metaphor, especially when Bean says, “We’ve based our whole system on predictability”. After all, this is how ‘summer movies’ work – films like … well, The Island – creating sci-fi worlds for 15-year-olds of all ages. They’re spectacular, familiar, machine-tooled as a clone and just as sexless; “We find it simpler to eliminate the sex-drive,” notes Bean dryly.
Still, the clone-factory scenes are fun to watch, with Big Brother-isms all over the place – signs on the walls, doublespeak like “Tranquillity Centre” and “Wellness Evaluation” – and clones in pristine white uniforms shuffling down corridors, past glass walls and doors that slide shut as in a spaceship. Totalitarian detail is everywhere: clones are separated by sex and advised to “watch your proximity”, with “emotional outbursts” discouraged and the Island as the far-off ideal used to control the masses. There’s even concentration-camp imagery (as there was in War of the Worlds), with imprinted serial numbers and clones herded into a death chamber – not exactly earned in this kind of popcorn movie, but still quite interesting.
Trouble is, director Michael Bay and his fellow chimps aren’t interested; why else would they give away the plot in the trailer, robbing these early scenes of much of their impact? Knowing the whole thing is a scam, and the Island doesn’t exist, makes the first act feel academic, just killing time before our heroes – Ewan McGregor as ‘Lincoln Six Echo’ and Scarlett Johansson as ‘Jordan Two Delta’ – work out the truth. Bay, the director behind such films as Armageddon and Bad Boys 2, is best-known for vertiginous action and epileptically-fast cutting, and you can almost feel him straining at the leash while Ewan and Scarlett are trapped in the clone-factory. When they (and we) escape his camera swirls around them in 360-degree pans, dipping and soaring in the desert landscape as if relishing its first taste of freedom.
Unfortunately that’s also where things get less interesting (indeed, that may be why they spoiled the twist in the trailer, so we wouldn’t get too involved in the clone world only to find ourselves dropped into yet another mindless chase movie). Plausibility is fairly unimportant to such films, but let’s just note The Island is wildly implausible. Two people on foot in the middle of nowhere, pursued by experienced commandos, would obviously never get beyond a mile of the factory, let alone make their way to LA where Ewan meets his “sponsor” (also Ewan, but with a Scottish accent) and Bay orchestrates various chases and nick-of-time escapes.
More importantly, the film never gives its clones much personality. They’re meant to be na?ve and unsocialised, fish out of water in the modern world – and sometimes they are, but only in a brief, lazy way. They have no trouble reading maps or navigating a city of the near future – the film is set in 2017 and LA looks much the same, apart from elevated trains and phones that let you see the other person – in fact they seem perfectly normal, but once in a while comes a joke or bit of business to remind us they’re less-than-human. Thus, e.g. they go to a bar looking for their friend on the outside (Steve Buscemi) only to be told he’s “in the can” at the moment. “In a can?!” exclaims shocked Ewan. Yeah, y’know – in the can, taking a dump. Taking a dump? Where is he taking it? Ah, the magic of juvenile toilet-humour.
The Island is indeed pretty juvenile, as well as noisy and excessively long; as in Bad Boys 2, Bay adds an extended third act – the clones going back to the factory – so the big action climax starts just when the film seems to be over. And his way of shooting action is exhausting (if artistic, in its own perverse way), cutting and thrusting so the images seem to fragment into abstract patterns of flame and shards of glass. One scene alone is memorable: a car-chase down the highway where a truck loses its cargo of heavy metal axles, the barbell-like monsters hurtling through the air at pursuing cars, spawning fireballs and smashing into windshields. It’s not exactly Shakespeare – or Orwell, or Huxley – but maybe that’s all for the best.
One final irony: this film about clones reared to the mental level of 15-year-olds has itself been rated ‘15’ in Cyprus, barring a large proportion of its target audience. Adults should probably avoid, or at least wait for DVD (or LTV) where they can watch the first hour and skim through the rest. The trouble is what to watch instead. There are two new movies this weekend but they’re Herbie: Fully Loaded and Edison, the former a wan resurrection of the Disney kiddie franchise, the latter an obscure film debut for pop star Justin Timberlake. Neither holds any interest for viewers past the age of consent.
Is there any hope? Well, maybe a little. The Friends of the Cinema Society opens its doors this week, starting with the Greek Film Festival that’s also being shown at the Rialto in Limassol (full details on page 35) – and news came from Greece last week of plans to build a ‘new wave’ of multiplexes, showing a wide range of films from Hollywood to arthouse instead of just targeting teens. Personally I doubt it’ll happen, even in Greece, and it’s most unlikely to be copied in Cyprus: after all, you can’t argue with the market. But at least it’s a straw we can clutch at, we sturdy cinephiles increasingly frustrated by the range of films in local cinemas. We line up for trash but they can’t break our spirit. We have our dream. We have our Island.
CONTEMPORARY GREEK CINEMA FESTIVAL
THE sad truth is that Greek cinema has never been a big player on the world stage. Only a handful of directors have broken beyond the confines of Greece itself, notably Theo Angelopoulos and the Cyprus-born Michael Cacoyannis, both born before WW2. There hasn’t been a new international ‘name’ hailing from Greece in the past 20 years – but of cou
rse Greek films still get released, and some of them do very well. Five recent ones are being shown this week at the Rialto in Limassol (Tel. 25-343900) and the Friends of the Cinema Society in Nicosia (Tel. 22-420491), starting on Thursday the 15th.
Constantinos Giannaris is perhaps the only Greek director to have ‘broken through’, even slightly: his film From the Edge of the City (1998) played all over the world, including London and New York. His latest work is Hostage, a based-on-fact drama about a young Albanian who takes over a bus, holding seven people hostage so he can start a new life with the ransom money. If you’re only going to watch one film in the Festival, this is probably the most prestigious – though I should note I’ve spotted it on DVD in at least one Nicosia video club.
Other films include Delivery, directed by the well-known Nicos Panayiotopoulos, offering “a bird’s eye view of contemporary Athens” through the travails of a pizza-delivery boy, and Ena Tragoudi Den Ftanei (A Song is Not Enough), about a young mother imprisoned by the military junta in 1972, and how her incarceration affects her best friend, ex-husband and nine-year-old daughter. I know very little about these films, and the same goes for Matia apo Nychta (Eyes by Night) – except this love story between lonely fortysomethings was directed by the veteran Pericles Hoursoglou and won prizes at the 2003 Thessaloniki Film Festival.
I’ve only seen one film in the Festival, and I fervently hope it’s the worst: Min Fevgeis (Don’t Go), a shallow sensationalist look at college life which played for a week at the multiplex before disappearing (though not, it seems, for good). Visually ugly and clich?-ridden, this was probably the worst film I saw last year, and I can only say ‘Avoid’. Sometimes there’s a reason why Greek films don’t travel.
