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(Warning: The following review contains plot spoilers. Also, it should be noted that there are two distinct faces to The Island. One face is that of an intellectual thriller that explores some of the most pressing moral questions of the present day and demonstrates a remarkable amount of respect for the dignity of human life; for this reason I recommend the film. The other face is that of an action flick with all of the genre-typical moral obfuscation-innocents being killed in fiery car-chases, etc. The film also contains a brief, non-explicit sex scene. The film is definitely not suitable for children and parents are strongly cautioned to review the content of the film.)

Michael Bay is a director that makes explosions, and he happens to make them very well. The director of such Hollywood blockbusters as Pearl Harbor and Bad Boys is renowned for making things go BOOM!, a lot. The newest project from Bay, the $120 million The Island, is no different in this respect.

But the most curious and surprising thing about The Island is that not only do a lot of things go boom, but it is a philosophically and morally explosive piece of art. In an interview about The Island Sean Bean (The Lord of the Rings), who plays the bad guy, mused: “I found [The Island] quite disturbing…because it makes you think about it…You really have to wonder if it’s right.”

By “it” Bean means human cloning and all the many contingent moral dilemmas arising from its practice, which pertinent moral dilemmas the film tackles with a lovely-to-behold moral deftness.

The movie was so very deeply disturbing; and that is the greatest complement I can give it. Hollywood rarely creates truly disturbing films; mostly they’re just sick, and it’s not at all the same thing. The Island, however, made me want to stand up in the theatre and scream long philosophical and theological diatribes at the screen. That’s disturbing.

Purposely set in the only-too-near future the movie focuses on two characters played by Ewan McGregor (Lincoln Six-Echo) and Scarlett Johansson (Jordan Two-Delta). For the first twenty minutes of the movie it’s all classic and predictable science-fiction, 1984/utopian stuff.

The ‘outside’ world has been contaminated (presumably through nuclear warfare) and there remains one last bastion of humanity. Lincoln Six-Echo and Jordan Two-Delta are two close friends who live in a futuristic, climate controlled complex that shields the inhabitants from ‘the contamination’. The several thousand residents all live regulated lives. Everybody wears the same white tracksuit, eats the same food according to strict dietary restrictions, exercises regularly and reports to ‘wellness centers’ whenever automated sleep and urine detectors indicate that something in the body is off-kilter.

Besides performing various mundane jobs and entertaining themselves at night with virtual sports and frequenting stylish futuristic bars, the residents spend their time dreaming about being chosen by the daily “lotteries” to go to The Island. The Island, the residents are told, is the only uncontaminated place left on earth; it is a tropical paradise, and to be chosen go to is the ultimate dream of every resident. Once there the residents will begin the noble process of repopulating the earth.

Of course all isn’t as it seems. Lincoln Six-Echo (McGregor) demonstrates an unusual level of curiosity which leads him at various points to enter restricted areas of the complex under false pretences. Eventually his curiosity leads him to explore further and he enters a restricted area of the building that he has never seen before.

This is where the movie begins to disturb. Through a series of discoveries Lincoln realizes that there is no island at all, but rather winning the lottery means that your time has come to be harvested for your organs and other body parts. Lincoln flees in horror with Jordan Two-Delta, who had herself won the lottery not hours before, in tow; they outwit the security and eventually escape the complex.

Once the pair leave the only world they’ve ever known, escaping to a not particularly futuristic Californian outback town, they track down one of the tech/mechanical staff from the complex, McCord, who Lincoln had befriended earlier and who had sometimes smuggled contraband to him. McCord begrudgingly explains that in fact the pair, and all the inhabitants of the complex, are clones who have been created as several million dollar ‘insurance policies’ for some of society’s wealthy elite. That is to say, if the person who ordered the ‘insurance policy’ starts falling ill, they will glean their clone from the general populace by arranging it so that their clone wins the lottery; then they harvest the perfectly compatible organs or tissue they need to continue to live.

One of the great scenes, great for its simplicity, occurs when McCord tries to explain to the newly escaped clones that they’re not real people. “You’re clones,” he says to them. When they look increasingly confused he tries to clarify, stammering: “You’re not like me…You’re not real people. You’re copies of real people.” But that doesn’t quite seem to work either. So he finishes off with a bang, “You don’t have souls.”

Of course it’s all rubbish, and that’s the point. The confusion of Lincoln and Jordan, and the horror of their dawning understanding is evidence enough of their humanity. As I thought about it later I could almost picture a doctor performing ‘in utero’ surgery on a twenty-one week old baby trying to gently explain that the only reason he was doing it was because the baby was ‘wanted’, but that if he wasn’t wanted then he “wasn’t a real person.” That’s precisely the sort of bizarre image that this movie is designed to invoke.

There are so many gut-wrenching parts of this film that it’s difficult to know what to talk about; in the theater I often found myself clenching my fists as I heard the grossly illogical, emotionally based ‘arguments’ and counter-‘arguments’ that are conjured forth to justify the morally atrocious acts about which I daily write.

There are devastating scenes-reminiscent of the images we have recently seen of the inside of the mother’s womb produced by modern ultrasound technology-that take place inside the gestating facility where the viewer is shown thousands of variously-developed clones growing in mechanical uteruses. In another heart-wrenching sequence the new-born baby of a cloned mother is snatched from her mother’s arms and then placed into the arms of an ecstatic adoptive mother and father. The true mother is then killed because she was nothing more than a ‘carrier’ and she has served her purpose. In yet another shot a hulking, muscular man, who we later find out is the clone of a professional football player, escapes from the operating room just as they are beginning to harvest his heart. As he is brought to his knees by security he bellows out from through his tears: “I want to live! I want to live!” He doesn’t live, however, because he is only a ‘product’ and not a person. Just as our current clones, we are assured, are ‘embryos’, not persons.

And then there is the particularly painful Terri Schiavo reference, where Bean’s character, who heads the facility, informs potential ‘buyers’ that the facility keeps all of the clones in Permanent Vegetative States. It’s a lie of course, but that doesn’t matter, because it makes the customers feel good about what they’re doing. It’s all about what language you use. Call them ‘products’, not persons; point out that you’re saving life, but forget to mention that you’re also destroying it.

The oft-repeated aphorism of the movie is “people will do anything to survive.” Anything, the insinuation is, including the murder of another who has an equal right to live.

Philosophically the climactic scene is that which takes place between Bean’s character, Merrick, the intelligent, driven, passionate head of the cloning facility, and his hired bounty hunter, played by Djimon Hounsou (Gladiator). Over the length of the film, as he hunts down Lincoln and Jordan, Hounsou’s character comes to realize that the clones are human. In this final intellectual show-down Hounsou shows Merrick a scar on his hand, similar to the one that the clones are imprinted with, explaining that after a war in his home country he was branded and labelled “less than human.”

“War is just a business,” he says. Then he asks of Merrick, “When did you make killing your business?”

But Merrick protests angrily that he doesn’t kill, but rather that he gives life. He rattles off a list of diseases he can cure by using his clones. “I can cure child leukemia!” he finally yells at Hounsou. “How many people can say that they can do that?”

Hounsou leans back in his chair with a sly smile. “Just you and God. That’s the answer you want isn’t it?”

I’ll close off with the following quote from director Michael Bay. Speaking about his movie Bay said: “The analogy I can make is that everybody eats meat, but we don’t want to know what goes on in the slaughter house. Our movie takes place in the slaughter house.”

The only difference is that the ‘product’ of the slaughter house in The Island is human beings. And the only difference between the slaughter house of The Island, and the cloning labs and stem cell labs and in vitro fertilization clinics of the present, is the size of the clones. We kill life in order to cure it. We kill life in order to create it.

“The film takes a very high and mighty attitude towards its morally ambiguous subject,” says one reviewer. “Anyone who even speculates that a person has every right to create a clone and harvest it is portrayed as a Nazi or a pervert.”

But that’s simply not true. Most, if not all, of the employees of the cloning facility are show as regular human beings with regular human lives and regular human sympathies. Merrick himself is presented as truly believing the benevolent nature of what he’s doing; the creators of The Island go to great length to make us sympathize with Merrick. But it just won’t work; it just doesn’t gel.

If the reviewer walked away with the idea that those who believe that someone has the right to clone to kill to live looks like a Nazi or a pervert, it’s because he has enough of the remnants of a once intact moral vision to know that this just isn’t a morally ambiguous subject. And that is the beauty of The Island. It doesn’t moralize, it tells, it shows, and as it shows it deftly destroys any moral ambiguity that has been fabricated by the scientific community without even trying all that hard.