The Island (2005 film)

The Island
Promotional poster for The Island
Directed by	Michael Bay
Written by	Caspian Tredwell-Owen Alex Kurtzman Roberto Orci
Produced by	Kenny Bates Michael Bay
Starring	Ewan McGregor Scarlett Johansson
Music by	Steve Jablonsky
Distributed by	Dreamworks SKG
Release dates	July 22, 2005 (North America)
Running time	127 min.
Language	English
Budget	US$122,200,000

The Island is a sci-fi film first released by DreamWorks SKG on July 22 2005, starring Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson. The film was directed by Michael Bay, written by Caspian Tredwell-Owen, Alex Kurtzman, and Roberto Orci, and produced by Kenny Bates and Michael Bay. Prior to its theatrical release, some reviewers of the film criticised it for being too simplistic and derivative of other motion pictures. Critics have claimed that The Island is a pastiche of "escape-from-dystopia" science fiction films produced in the late 1960s and 1970s such as Fahrenheit 451, THX 1138, Parts: The Clonus Horror, and Logan's Run. It earned over $160 million worldwide in its theatrical release, and cost $122 million to produce.

Plot

The film's plot appears to be set in the year 2019 (in the real world, it is actually past the year 2050) and is centered around a seemingly utopian colony of people, apparently rescued from the overpolluted outside world. Isolated in an enormous building, the people of the structure live according to the rules that are selected for them: their clothes, their meals, their leisure, and other human activities. After a seemingly random amount of time, which is commonly one week, a lottery relocates one person to a paradise known as "The Island."

Lincoln Six-Echo, played by Ewan McGregor, is one of the colonists.

When the film begins, he awakes from a nightmare. In his nightmare (which is the opening sequence) we see a blonde woman in classical, flowing, Grecian robes in white, on board of a futuristic boat with Lincoln. The dream appears relaxed but then of him being drowned before startling him into consciousness in his white, sterile bedroom. A sensor strip along his wall in his white, sterile bedroom, wishes him a good morning and detects his erratic REM cycle. His urine also has excess sodium so he is told he will need to have a "nutritional advisement". Even more displeasing for Lincoln is that he is missing a left Puma shoe. Lincoln is in a large white complex and takes an elevator down to the ground level. In the elevator, Lincoln watches as Starkweather Two-Delta (played by Michael Clarke Duncan) bragging about winning the most recent lottery competition. We see him being denied his bacon and him getting some through fellow resident and Lincoln's best friend, Jordan Two-Delta (played by Scarlett Johansson) who sweet-talks the food clerk. She mentions a 'match' for tonight before they are separated. Lincoln's nightmares surprise Dr. Merrick (played by Sean Bean) in the Tranquility Center: dreams involving a boat, azure blue waters, a resplendent island, drowning and the word Renovatio.

After he arrives at the Department of Labor, a fellow employee, Lima One Alpha, of his goes into labor and is moved to a separate room to give birth.

Lincoln subsequently causes a computer failure in order to visit his friend James McCord (played by Steve Buscemi), who works in a restricted area that is presumed to have a contamination risk. While in this area, Lincoln happens upon something unusual: a flying insect. Had the outside world been contaminated the insect would not have appeared in the building. Lincoln catches the insect to take back to his room.

At a nightclub after a virtual reality match between Lincoln and Jordan - using a giant X Box in which Jordan wins - Lincoln tells Jordan about the insect he captured as well as sharing his skepticism about the "contamination" and about the "survivors" coming to the colony on a fairly regular basis, but Jordan simply calls Lincoln pessimistic. At the same time, The Lottery plays in which the Community Announcer (Noa Tishby) announces that Jordan is the winner and the next person to head to The Island. Lincoln and Jordan are separated by one of the Censors because Lincoln and Jordan committed a "proximity violation" which in reality means that they touched each other's arms.

Later on during the night, Lincoln has another bad nightmare. Shaken by his most recent nightmare, he decides to sneak out of his room and the colony to where he caught the insect. He then releases the insect and decides to follow it. Lincoln climbs a ladder which takes him out of the colony and up to the upper levels of the facility.

He arrives on an upper floor, which is in the inner workings of the facility, and he discovers the truth behind his existence. He encounters two people who supposedly went to the Island recently. Lima One-Alpha gives birth and then is murdered, as the midwife (Svetlana Efremova) merely looks on coldly. It turns out that the baby is for the benefit of an identical looking woman and her husband (whom Lincoln didn't see). Starkweather wakes up during surgery to extract his organs and flees in panic. The staff drag him back with harpoon guns as he begs to be allowed to live. Shocked by this discovery and knowing that Jordan is next to go to the Island (i.e. to be killed), Lincoln races back to the colony to save her from death.

Outside

When Jordan Two-Delta is called to be moved to The Island, Lincoln makes a desperate attempt to escape to the outer world, taking Jordan with him. It is just in time, as Merrick analyzes CCTV images of Starkweather's attempted escape, he recognises Lincoln and orders his capture. After Lincoln and Jordan avoid capture by the Censors, they escape the colony and the institute and emerge outside a U.S. military nuclear missile silo base in the desert near Yuma, Arizona.

In the outside world, which has advanced but is hardly utopian, Lincoln and Jordan arrive at a bar which is frequented by McCord (the two find the bar using the matchbox Lincoln used to capture the insect earlier in the movie). McCord is shocked to find both Lincoln and Jordan outside of the institute (because McCord knows the serious ramifications of this). McCord then takes Lincoln and Jordan back to his home and he reveals to both of them that they and everyone else in the colony, save for the staff and Merrick, are clones, or "agnates." Jordan replies that she remembers her mother, but then McCord tells Jordan exactly what she remembers, and explains that the memories were implanted (he has a friend who was involved in that). When Lincoln injected nutrients into tubes, he actually fed unfinished clones.

When the clones are supposedly being moved to "The Island", they are really being killed, and their organs harvested for transplant to their "sponsor", or genetic originator, whose need for the organs corresponds to who will "win the lottery." When Jamal Starkweather, a football player, needs a liver, his clone, Starkweather Two-Delta, is killed for his. Interestingly, the sponsors (and the general public) are totally unaware of the true origin of their replacement organs. Jordan's sponsor, Sarah Jordan, requires a full organ transplant to live after a car crash, which will surely kill Jordan Two-Delta.

It seems that Dr. Merrick, who is the CEO of the company involved, tells prospective buyers that the clones are kept in a persistent vegetative state, and are never really 'alive.' Unfortunately, it seems keeping clones in such a state renders the organs harvested useless. They need to experience life in some form in order to be viable donors. So he keeps them fed and makes them useful, ignorant of sex, and gives them just enough education to have the mental ability of a 15-year-old.

McCord gives Lincoln and Jordan clothes, money and a credit card to help them find their sponsors and reveal the truth. To help them, McCord reveals that Lincoln's sponsor lives in Los Angeles as well as revealing to Jordan that her sponsor lives in New York City.

The owner of the facility sends a mercenary strike team to find the fugitives, led by Albert Laurent (Djimon Hounsou). At the train station to Los Angeles, the strike team kills McCord and gives chase to Lincoln and Jordan. Lincoln and Jordan successfully evade Laurent's team members and go on the Amtrak train to Los Angeles.

Los Angeles

After arriving in Los Angeles, Jordan tries to phone her sponsor, and the phones have a video link, so she sees that it's answered by a young boy with a striking resemblance to her. The boy says that Sarah Jordan, his mom, is very sick. Then he turns toward the phone, sees Jordan Two-Delta and mistakes her for his mother. Suddenly, the L.A.P.D. shows up and arrests both Lincoln and Jordan on the claim that they were connected with McCord's murder near Yuma as well as both Lincoln and Jordan using McCord's credit card to contact their sponsors via phone. While the two are taken to the police station for a DNA test, Laurent's team violently strikes at the police with the intent of killing Lincoln and Jordan. During the confusion, Lincoln and Jordan escape from the destroyed police car and the mercenary team follows after them. Lincoln and Jordan get onto a semi-trailer carrying train wheel-axle assemblies, which they release onto the mercenary team's vehicles with devastating results.

The two later capture a futuristic jet-bike from the mercenary team and use it to escape from Laurent's team. They end up gripping a giant company logo, a big red 'R' on a building and the bullets from the helicopter and the two men who disguise themselves as police causes the logo to topple and take the helicopter down with it. Lincoln and Jordan survive the fall when the logo crashes into some scaffolding and a construction worker helps them, saying that Jesus must love them and then checks Jordan saying that He "definitely" loves Jordan. When the clones pass a shop front, Jordan sees an image of herself with a handsome man advertising Calvin Klein's Eternity perfume. Lincoln spots her looking and the advert playing her kissing the man and Jordan touches her own lips, identical to the ones on screen. Lincoln finds his sponsor, playboy racer Tom Lincoln (who speaks with a Scottish accent, unlike his clone who speaks with an American accent) in an expensive and luxurious apartment. It is there, Lincoln spots Renovatio, the ship he saw in his dream. Tom informs him that it means 'Rebirth' in Latin (a correct translation would be renewal, restoration). He flirts with Jordan, saying that he has seen her in Maxim magazine and kisses her soft skin. Tom Lincoln agrees to help the two plead their case before the media. However, he then goes and phones the institute, informing them that his 'insurance policy' is sitting in his living room. Jordan whispers that she sees the same look of deceit in Tom's eyes that she picked out in Lincoln's eyes when he was lying. It turns out that she was right. The sponsor betrays the clone when Tom Lincoln pulls a Makarov PM handgun on Lincoln Six-Echo while the two were heading to the television station in a Cadillac Cien to tell the public of what Merrick Biotech were doing (it was revealed earlier that Tom was suffering from liver failure due to his playboy lifestyle and he had two years left before his liver fails, and it must be replaced with Six-Echo's). When the mercenary team encounters the two, however, Laurent and his men cannot distinguish the sponsor from the clone - in a classic irony scene, the two men are dressed the same, and Six-Echo is perfectly mimicking Tom Lincoln's Scottish accent. Lincoln Six-Echo, having removed his clone ID bracelet, replaces it on the real Lincoln's arm, causing Laurent to point his gun at Tom Lincoln and shooting him dead. Lincoln Six-Echo then pretends he is Tom Lincoln to escape from Laurent and his team. Laurent urges Tom (secretly Six-Echo) to secrecy about the events behind Merrick's company, to which Six-Echo replies (in Tom's distinct Scottish accent), "I just want to live. I don't care how."

When Lincoln Six-Echo returns to Tom Lincoln's apartment, Jordan makes sure that he is Six-Echo and not Tom while pointing one of Tom Lincoln's Makarov handguns at Lincoln Six-Echo. After Jordan finds out it was Lincoln Six-Echo and not Tom Lincoln, she kisses him. Natural instinct takes over and they make love in Tom Lincoln's home.

Returning to the facility

Dr. Merrick decides that some of the agnates are too curious by far, especially as Lincoln Six Echo retained memories of his sponsor. So he decides to exterminate the 'curious' generations which are Echo, Foxtrot and Gamma generations. This includes one of Lincoln's friends, Jones Three-Echo (Ethan Phillips), who is obsessive about going to the Island.

Instead of fleeing their captors and living off Tom Lincoln's identity and fortune, Lincoln decides to infiltrate the cloning complex. Soon after Lincoln departs Jordan (in Los Angeles) buys children in a park - presumably near the ocean, ice cream cones from a Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream stand. Jordan pays for it with a credit card, alerting Laurent and his team. Jordan is caught by the mercenary team and brought back to be dissected. During the car trip, Laurent notices the agnate brand mark on Jordan's wrist and we see he has a tinge of conscience. Lincoln goes into the complex as Tom Lincoln, ostensibly to have a replacement agnate made again of himself, but intends to head to the Holographic Room, to disable the projector. Meanwhile, Jordan escapes from the operating table, shooting one of the staff in the leg who had gloated to her about what they were going to remove. She swipes the doctor's Tri-key and the guard's walkie-talkie before meeting up with Lincoln. Jordan tells Lincoln to shut the holographic projector while Jordan rescues the clones.

File:Theislandpubf.jpg

Scarlett Johansson as Jordan Two Delta when she is captured in the Merrick Institute.

Laurent, who is African, has a twinge of conscience about dehumanising those who are clearly human, because he and members of his family were involved in the Burkinabe rebellion (possibly in Burkina Faso) in Africa in which Laurent's father (who was involved in the rebellion) was killed and Laurent and his brothers were branded on the palm of their left hand to tell others that he and his brothers were "less than human."

He was also disgusted to learn from Dr. Merrick that Jordan Two-Delta would be killed although it would most likely have no effect in saving Sarah Jordan's life (the delay had been too long), which he regarded as completely unnecessary killing. As a result, Laurent aids Jordan in rescuing a group of clones from being killed in a massive incinerator, including Jones Three Echo.

Lincoln destroys the holographic projectors surrounding the facility (which reveals the truth about the institute's location to the agnates), inadvertantly kills Dr. Merrick in a fight between the two in which Lincoln bellows - after Merrick calls him "Six Echo" - "My name is Lincoln!", and causes gigantic fans to collapse, thus destroying the facility. Then the clones run out to escape the colony and enter the real world. The last few scenes of the clones escaping show the vast number of clones and attempt to portray the real world through their eyes.

Lincoln and Jordan meet outside the facility where the other clones are rushing outside and they embrace. Jordan and Lincoln look at Laurent who smiles and leaves as helicopters circle overhead. The very last image is of Lincoln's dream come true as he and Jordan sail away near some real, beautiful tropical island through familiar azure blue waters and a rocky coastline and on the Renovatio.

Controversy

Due to many points of similarity, some have accused the filmmakers of remaking the 1979 film Parts: The Clonus Horror without crediting the original as described in this article. The concept for the movie has also been compared to the science fiction novels Brave New World, The Giver, House of the Scorpion, Logan's Run and Anthem. Reviewers have also objected to the prominent product placement within the film. MSN Search, Xbox, Puma, Apple Computer, Aquafina, Speedo, Ben & Jerry's and Nokia are some of the sponsors of the film.

Michael Marshall Smith's 1996 novel Spares, in which the hero liberates intelligent clones from a "spares farm" whose clients are told they are not conscious, was optioned by Dreamworks in the late 1990s but was never made. It remains unclear if the story inspired The Island, and Marshall Smith did not consider it worthwhile to pursue legal action over the similarities. Paramount was in talks to option the novel after Dreamworks' rights expired, but declined after The Island was released; Marshall Smith considers it unlikely a Spares film will ever be made.[1]

Symbolism and references to other films

The film comes out at a time when stem-cell research has come to the fore of public debate, and much of the dialogue of The Island can be read as a critique on recent advancements in genetic engineering. Such debates frequently center around what constitutes personhood, and the ethics of such research. Towards the end of the movie there is to be a mass-execution of "defective" products. They are put into a large room marked "incinerator" and made to burn, a reference to the Holocaust and the cremation of "defective" human beings.

The movie may also be considered to include subtle references to the Exodus - after escaping, Lincoln (McGregor) returns to free his people. Another subtle reference to the Bible that was seen in The Island can be found in one scene when Lincoln and Jordan found a rattlesnake in the ruins of a building in the desert outside of the institute. This scene can be seen as a reference to Adam and Eve with the Serpent. The Garden of Eden is also mentioned in the film.

In the movie, the attire and the appearance the Censors (the security personnel at the institute and the colony) can be seen as a subtle reference to the Sandmen from the 1976 movie Logan's Run with the Censors and the Sandmen both wearing black and grey uniforms. While on the other hand, the white attire of the clones can be seen as a subtle reference to the attire worn by the main characters in the 1971 movie THX 1138.

There are several links between this film and The Matrix trilogy. Cinematically, both films are shot often with faintly colored gels/filters. Also, several shots in both films have an over-exposed, too bright feeling to them to enhance the sterility or falsity of the scene. Additionally, the car chase scenes, though orchestrated by different special effects crews, bear striking similarities--cars being dramatically flipped and/or fantastically ripped/torn apart by other cars and flying objects. Additionally, the displacement of the business building logo in the film captures the same effect when the helicopter crashed in the first Matrix movie. The large circular towers in which the 'product' people are housed is also quite similar to the harvesting fields of the Matrix, in which the machines harvested humans for electrical energy instead of organs. Also, when Lincoln Six Echo roars "My name is Lincoln!" one is instantly reminded of when Neo growls "My name is Neo!" when fighting Agent Smith.

Actor Steve Buscemi, who plays the part of McCord, is attached to playing card symbolism. The bar where Lincoln Six Echo finds McCord is called the Aces and SPADES. When Lincoln confronts McCord in the bar's bathroom, McCord's pants are down, and his white boxer shorts featuring black CLUBS are exposed. When McCord takes Lincoln to his home, there are white plastic slits in the chain-link fence of his front yard that make the shape of white DIAMONDS. The inevitable reference to HEARTS appears to be that McCord is shot in the heart by one of Laurent's mercenaries as he aids Lincoln and Jordan in their escape to Los Angeles in search of their sponsors. In addition, the name McCord conjures up the word umbilical cord. McCord, by exposing Lincoln to the truth and stimulating his curiosity, symbolically cuts Lincoln's umbilical cord by removing him from the artificial world of the Merrick Institute.

The movie has many many visual similarities and elements from a wide variety of movies including Coma, the Fifth Element, Metropolis (anime film), Return of the Jedi, Freejack, even Blade Runner, 1984, The Blues Brothers and Clockwork Orange. As such, it is not an uncredited remake or a pure derivative work. Aside from these interesting elements, the utter destruction of the car-chases, the high-fall and the incinerator scene combined with the bright daylight cinematography and social satire stand out as unique to this film.

Although the general idea of growing clones for spare parts in an isolated area and controlling their education is apparently taken from Parts: The Clonus Horror, there are major differences from Clonus, a low budget affair, that are notable. The clones are older in Clonus, the escaped clone is befriended and aided in Clonus and most of satirical elements in The Island are not present in Clonus. Cinematically, that is to say, visually, there is no resemblance between the two. Clonus is also decidedly low tech. It is possible, ironically, to describe The Island not as a remake but a collection of cloned parts from many movies and some science fiction stories.

Also, there is a rather coincidental but substantial link to the movie Gladiator. Besides Djimon Hounsou starring in both movies, the final sequence's musical score bears a striking resemblance to the music from Gladiator's final sequence. The music for Gladiator was composed by Hans Zimmer, who produced the music for The Island (although the Composer credit was given to Steve Jablonsky, Jablonsky is a member of Zimmer's Remote Control Productions team.) And, during the final sequences in both movies, Hounsou enigmatically smiles and walks off while the music plays upliftingly before swelling for the end credits.

Scientific accuracies and inaccuracies

The film presents the idea that entire humans are cloned in order to harvest organs, rather than cloning individual organs in vitro. As it turns out, however, the proposal of this movie is actually in line with current technology in the sense that it would be easier, though still difficult to clone an entire organism than to clone just one of its organs. In order to clone an organ, the entire chemical environment of the body - numerous growth factor proteins, complex fats and sugars, etc. - must be artificially reproduced. This is not currently practical, since we are still not certain how full organ development occurs.

However, a cloned individual would be a baby, not an adult. Speeding up aging, as we currently understand the cell cycle, would probably be irreversible (meaning that we couldn't stop it once we started it), and it would be incredibly difficult to 'age' someone to a very specific age. In essence, speeding up someone's age would just make them die more quickly, not advance them physically to a later phase in life. On the other hand, it seems that the clones are grown around some sort of matrix that "sets" the age since Six Echo's fingerprints are identical to Tom Lincoln's (even identical twins do not have the same fingerprints). This would also explain why some of Tom's neural patterns have been copied to Six Echo.

Sean Bean's character, Dr. Merrick, suggests that he was two years away from curing childhood leukemia. One of the current treatments for leukemia involves killing all blood cells via chemotherapy or radiation, and then transplanting the blood cells of a non-cancerous individual via bone marrow transplant (bone marrow is where blood cells are made). To clone a human in order to help curing childhood leukemia would only be helpful in that the blood cells transfused from the non-cancerous individual would be your own.

In a panning shot during a montage sequence, the human 'embryos' in the clear bags are shown in different stages of growth. One bag appears to contain only the vascular system of a human. This is not the way that development occurs. The vascular system grows at the same time as the epidermis (skin) and internal organs, not in fully separate stages as is depicted. For more info, see developmental biology.

Finally, a comment on aging and Dolly, the cloned sheep. Dolly, though healthy immediately after birth, did not live a full life. It is sometimes alleged that this was because the cells from which she was cloned were adult cells. DNA molecules contains long stretches of meaningless repeating sequences at the tips of our DNA molecules, called telomeres. Each time a cell divides, its DNA is replicated, and because of the cellular machinery involved in cell replication, a little bit of the telomere is irreversibly removed each time. This slow degradation of the meaningless bit is one of the proposed explanations for the process of aging, since after a certain period of time, the DNA that is getting clipped off at each replication may not be meaningless anymore, but actually meaningful, important DNA. However, Dr Ian Wilmut, the creator of Dolly, has stated that Dolly's death probably had nothing to do with the fact that she was a clone. She caught a lung infection of a kind that is common to sheep kept indoors (as had to be the case with Dolly, for security reasons). Other cloned animals have lived lives of normal length for their species.

Potential plot holes explained

The truck with the train axles is seen as anachronistic by some with the presence of the maglev train, however as in any city with subways, it is often cheaper to leave the older technologies, such as subway cars, alone instead of upgrading everything to the latest and greatest technology.

That Lincoln 6 can drive a motorcycle has to be taken in the larger context of the presence of the powerboat Renovatio in his memories and dreams. This suggests that his abilities are linked to his sponsor's ability to ride motorcycles. Although this has "new-age"/pseudo-scientific connotations, in the context of the movie only, it makes it believable that he can fly the Jet-bike.

Being able to run and fight and plot against his pursuers is something Lincoln 6 could potentially have learned from his Xbox fighting, some would have been instinct.

The repairman that Jordan & Lincoln befriend says that their presence in L.A. would blow the whole thing open. It is not clear why this wouldn't happen anyway without their presence, but unstated in the movie is the idea that a clone in the presence of its sponsor is evidence that is not easily suppressed by the security apparatus of the corporation.

Trivia

• The culling of the clones was considered necessary because some series were becoming too intelligent and curious. These clones also seem to share some form of consciousness and residual memory with their originals. This is later explained, for why Lincoln's brain capacity is 30 times larger than that of his previous scan, and why he can fly jet cycles, drive cars.

• The name of the head doctor (and antagonist of the film, played by Sean Bean), has the name "Dr. Merrick." This name shows a striking similarity to the pharmaceutical company Merck.

• One of the clones was killed for being in the same group (Echo) as Lincoln Six Echo. All Echo clones were supposed to be the same age, but this clone clearly complains earlier of how much longer he has been waiting to go to the island (and has thus been alive longer). However, the length of a year could be different inside the Merrick facility and outside of it, thus explaining that phenomenom, as well as the differences in the dates inside and outside of the facility (2019 vs. the speculated 2050).

• The train axles were made out of rubber.

References

• Breznican, Anthony (March 18 2005). "Car-wreck 'Island' keeps director smash-happy". USA Today, p. E1.
• Rottentomatoes.com. Collection of reviews for The Island. Retrieved from http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/island/ on January 3 2006.

External links

• The Island — official website.
• The Island at IMDb.
• The Island at Rotten Tomatoes.