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$122,000,000

The Island is a sci-fi film first released by DreamWorks SKG on July 22 2005 (see 2005 in film). It stars Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson as human clones named Lincoln Six-Echo and Jordan Two-Delta. The sole existence of the clones is to provide their originals with individual body parts if they should be required. The plot involves the clones residing at an unknown location. A weekly competition named "the lottery" is held to determine the relocation of the clones; they are told that they will be sent to a place only known as "The Island". However, Echo and Delta learn the real motives of the lottery, and make an escape from the unknown location into the real world.

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, many reviews the film received criticised it for being too simplistic and derivative of other motion pictures. Critics have noted 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, and Logan's Run.

Plot summary

Template:Spoiler The film's plot is set in the year 2019 and it centres around a futuristic colony of people, apparently rescued from the overpolluted outside world. In this utopian haven, everything is chosen for them — what they wear, eat, play, drink, do and everything else. After a seemingly random amount of time, supposedly decided by a lottery, they are told they are being moved to "The Island", supposedly a wondrous, utopian paradise.

When Lincoln Six-Echo (Ewan McGregor) awakes on this fateful day, a strip along the wall greets him good morning and when he urinates, it tells him that he has high sodium levels and unfortunately won't be allowed any of his precious bacon for his breakfast. We then follow Lincoln and a group of other men as they head for an elevator which takes them to the main area of the colony. During the ride, they see a video interview of Starkweather Two-Delta (Michael Clarke Duncan), gloating about winning a lottery as well as saying that he's glad to go to the Island.

We finally arrive in the main area of the colony in which we see from Lincoln's point of view of a bar/nightclub area (which serves healthy, non-alcoholic beverages) as well as a gym area in which we see people using gym equipment as well as see an aerobics class with a number of men and women partaking in it. We also see a couple of men and women swimming in a pool wearing Speedo swimsuits, swimcaps and goggles as well as see a group of women wearing Speedos getting a tan from a UV light in the pool area.

Lincoln finally arrives in the dining area to get his breakfast and he asks a woman at the head of the breakfast dispensor if he can have some bacon with his breakfast. The woman at the head of the breakfast dispenser gives Lincoln some disgusting gloop (possibly oatmeal), but Jordan Two-Delta (Scarlett Johansson) — Lincoln's best friend — charms the woman into giving her some bacon and giving to Lincoln, saying that he'll need it for his match tonight against her.

After breakfast, Lincoln is sent to the Tranquility Center, where Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean) asks Lincoln about his proximity warnings with Jordan and his dream. It's of Lincoln with an almost angel-like Jordan on a boat (actually a Wallypower 118) sailing through turquoise blue waters to the Island. Then Lincoln is thrown overboard and drowns. Lincoln easily and artistically sketches the boat - adding the word 'Renovatio' to the corner of the page - and while drawing the boat, he tells Dr. Merrick about him questioning his surroundings and asking if there was more to life than waiting to go to the Island. Dr. Merrick then reminds Lincoln that he is lucky to survive the contamination and that he and the rest of the survivors were also lucky to go to the Island. Then, Dr. Merrick subjects Lincoln to a synaptic scan of his brain involving nano-robots which enter Lincoln's right eye.

As a result of his appointment with Dr. Merrick, Lincoln is therefore late for work at the Department of Labor in which the people of the colony maintain the nutrient lines for their "food". Suddenly, a pregnant resident, Lima One-Alpha (Siobhan Flynn), begins labor, which they believe means automatic entry to The Island.

After Lima One-Alpha was taken away from the lab to give birth to her baby, Lincoln fakes a computer failure so he can sneak out and see James McCord (Steve Buscemi), one of the staff members (a computer engineer) of the colony that is frendly with Lincoln as well as share with Lincoln some of his whiskey (kept in a flask which resembles a tiny jerrycan). After McCord was called back to work, Lincoln Six Echo-happens upon something unusual, a flying insect, which shouldn't have been there if the outside world were really contaminated. Lincoln then captures the insect and takes it back to his room.

Later, he and Jordan do a virtual-reality and motion sensor martial-arts match using a massive XBox, and Jordan defeats Lincoln. They meet up at the nightclub where Lincoln tells Jordan about the insect he captured as well as sharing his scepticism about the "contamination" and about the "survivors" coming to the colony on a fairly regular basis, to which Jordan tells Lincoln stop focusing on the "negative" and focus on the "postive" and that good things do come to people. At the same time, The Lottery was played in which the Community Announcer (Noa Tishby) announced that Jordan was the winner and the next person to head to The Island. Lincoln congratulates Jordan on winning the Lottery and the two are separated by one of the Censors because Lincoln and Jordan committed a proximity violation.

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 gave birth, and the staff promised that she would soon hold the baby and then be off to the island. But then they murdered her by lethal injection, and the young midwife (Svetlana Efremova) merely looks on coldly as she restrains her feet (which have already been toe-tagged) during her brief death convulsion. It turns out that the baby is for the benefit of an identical looking woman and her husband (whom Lincoln didn't see). Starkweather woke up during a surgery to extract his organs, and he fled in panic. The staff caught him with harpoon guns and literally reeled him in, as he was begging to be allowed to live. Shocked by this discovery and knowing that Jordan was next to go to the Island (i.e. to be killed), Lincoln raced 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 was just in time, because he was caught on video witnessing the horrors and Merrick recognized him, so they were also hunting him. After Lincoln and Jordan avoided capture by the Censors, they escaped the colony and the institute and emerged outside from a U.S. military nuclear missile silo base and into the harsh landscape of the Arizona desert.

In the outside world, which is actually our world, with slightly more advanced technology, Lincoln and Jordan have trouble with the slang of normal people when the two arrive at a bar which is frequented by McCord (the two found the bar using the matchbox Lincoln used to capture the insect earlier in the movie). Lincoln later finds McCord while he was on the toilet. McCord was shocked to find both Lincoln and Jordan outside of the institute (because McCord knew the serious ramifications of the two escaping from the institute). 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, is a clone, or "agnate". Jordan replies that she remembers her mother, but then McCord tells her exactly what she remembers, and explains that the memories were implanted (he has a friend who was involved in that). When Lincoln thought he was feeding nutrients to a food source, he was actually feeding 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 needed a liver, his clone, Starkweather Two-Delta, was 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, 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, and gives them enough education to have the intelligence 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 has revealed 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 kill McCord and give chase to Lincoln and Jordan. Lincoln and Jordan successfully evaded 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 says, "Mommy, is that you?". Suddenly, the L.A.P.D. show up and arrest both Lincoln and Jordan on the claim that they were connected with McCord's murder back in Arizona as well as both Lincoln and Jordan using McCord's credit card to contact their sponsors via phone. While the two were taken to the police station for a DNA test, Laurent's team violently strike 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.

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. He agrees to help the two plea 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 saw the same look of deceit in Tom's eyes that she always picked out in Six-Echo's eyes when he was lying. It turns out that she was right. The sponsor betrays the clone when Tom Lincoln pulls a handgun on Lincoln Six-Echo while the two were heading to the television station 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 urged 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 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 with Jordan pointing one of Tom Lincoln's two handguns at Lincoln Six-Echo. After Jordan found 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.

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.

Lincoln and Jordan infiltrate the cloning complex, after debating about whether to head south and escape their captors, living off Tom Lincoln's identity and fortune.

Lincoln goes in as Tom Lincoln, ostensibly to have a replacement agnate made again of himself, but then he heads to the Holographic Room, where he fights with Dr. Merrick. Jordan kindly gave ice cream to children back in Los Angeles, but paid with the credit card, so she is caught by the mercenary team and brought back to be dissected. She escapes from the operating table, however, shooting one of the staff in the leg who had gloated to her about what they were going to remove.

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". This twinge of conscience was brought about after Laurent saw Jordan's agnate registration and identification code branded on her wrist when Laurent and his team were bringing Jordan back to the institute after capturing her in Los Angeles.

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.

Lincoln destroys the holographic projectors surrounding the facility (which reveals the truth about the institute's location to the agnates), inadvertantly kills Dr. Merrick, and causes gigantic fans to collapse, thus destroying the facility. Then the clones run out to escape the colony and enter into the real world with the Censors and the staff at the facility doing a futile attempt to keep the clones inside the colony.

The very last image is of Lincoln's dream come true as he and Jordan sail away near some real, beautiful tropical island 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 The Giver and House of the Scorpion.

Reviewers have also objected to the prominent product placement within the film. MSN Search, Xbox, Puma, Apple Computer, Aquafina, Speedo 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 were 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 experimentation. Such debates frequently center around what constitutes personhood, whether the benefits outweigh the destruction of human embryos, and the potential for "God-like" behavior among geneticists.

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.

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. This is a poignant and unavoidable 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 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. 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.

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 Ace of 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.

Trivia

The character of Jordan Two-Delta's sponsor, Sarah Jordan, is actually based on the real life of her actor, Scarlett Johansson; one scene from the movie displays part of Johansson's advert for Calvin Klein's 'Eternity Moment' perfume. Also, the sponsor and the real actress have the same initials, S.J. This technique is also used for Ewan McGregor's sponsor-character; the sponsor's apartment in the movie features real-life photos of McGregor with his motorcycles and such.

The "09 V12 Caddy, 750 horsepower, $500,000 car" which Tom Lincoln owned is a concept car from General Motors: the Cadillac Cien, originally introduced in 2002. The car's specifications in the movie, as a 2009 production model, are identical to those of the concept, except of course for the price. During the chase sequence involving that car, the filmmakers edited in the sounds of a Formula One racing car.

In The Island, the movie showcased cartoons that were made by Warner Bros. and Dreamworks respectively in the background. On the television screens in the dining area of the colony, one Loony Tunes cartoon was being shown. Later on during the film, we see the 2001 movie Shrek playing on the TV in the background when Sarah Jordan's son answers the phone and was talking to Jordan Two-Delta.

Scientific Accuracies and Inaccuracies

Given the current state of cloning technology, it is somewhat difficult to foresee where the technology will go. However, there are certain things which we know for certain, so here is a brief discussion of accuracies and inaccuracies in the film on this topic. The film presents the idea that entire humans are cloned in order to harvest organs. Why not just clone organs? As it turns out, the proposal of this movie is actually in line with current technology--it is easier to clone an entire organism (which is not easy as it sounds), but it would be even harder to clone an organ. This is because cloning involves removing the nucleus (DNA) of an egg cell and inserting the nucleus of an adult cell from another organism. The chemical environment of an egg cell, when stimulated to think it has been fertilized and when in the presence of an adult DNA molecule, SOMETIMES results in the proliferation of this egg into an embryo, and ultimately, into an organism. In order to clone an organ, the entire chemical environment of the body--numerous growth factor proteins, complex fats and sugars, etc.--would have to be simluated artificially. This would prove next to impossible to do, since we are still not certain how full organ development occurs. The DNA molecule is 3200000000 units long, after all! Additionally, a cloned individual would be a baby, not an adult. Speeding up aging, as we currently understand the cell cycle, would probably be irreversible (meaing 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. Finally, a comment on aging and the cloned sheep, Dolly the sheep. Dolly, though healthy after birth, did not live a full life. This is 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. When one considers that humans shed BILLIONS of skin cells per day, meaning that skin cells are dividing every day, the process of skin aging begins to make sense. So, why not add more meaningless repeating sequences to the telomeres? Great idea! Such an enzyme exists--called telomerase--and it is active in many bacteria. However, the way that telomerase works can lead to mutation, and many human cancer cells have been shown to actually be expressing, (i.e. producing), telomerase. So, to clone a human who is fifty years old WILL yield a new baby, but only with the DNA as it currently is. The mutations present in the donated DNA, will be expressed in the clone. The clone of a fifty year old probably wouldn't live until their late teens or twenties. The solution to this possible dilemma would be to harvest cells (by taking a skin sample, etc.) from babies when they're born, and then freezing the cells for use later in life. Wouldn't you like a copy of your DNA from when you were a kid? A copy that didn't include the inevitable damage caused by the sun, environmental toxins, telomere degradation, etc.? Whoever invents THAT company will be a rich person indeed.

When Sean Bean's character, Dr. Merrick, suggests that he was a year away from curing childhood leukemia, our truth sensors should be peaked. 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. That's it.

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...ever. 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.

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