Michael Bay’s latest film, The Island, has seemingly had disappointing box office returns in America, and while I couldn’t call it a great film by an means, it does do exactly what it says on the tin. That’s to say, lots of explosions, big chases, pounding soundtrack, beautiful stars, camera filters aplenty, and a powerful momentum.
The opening half hour or so is a little slower than some audiences have come to expect, with the set-up slowly becoming clear, as our two heroes, Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, realise that they’re clones who’re being raised in super-quick time, to harvest body parts for rich clients in an outside world they know nothing about. They’re told something about a contamination.
The Island refers to a mythical place of beauty that “winners” of the a lottery get sent to. In reality, it means their time is up, and someone’s after their kidneys or lungs.
Of course the film is really Logan’s Run updated a bit, with some of Coma chucked in for good luck.
The action really takes place once they escape and are chased down by Djimon Hounsou’s crack team, with their seemingly endless supply of helicopters, armoured cars, SUVs and guns… lots of guns.
The best sequences in the film take place at this point with some dynamic stunt-heavy chase sequences. No doubt CGI helped a lot, particularly in a sequence involving a lorry shedding its load of wheel axels (a cargo that seems strangely incongruous in a time when so many vehicles seem to hover) along a motorway. As is always the case, the driver is completely unaware of his diminishing load, but it makes for some great obstacles to face the bad guys with.
And the effects are a superior set in this film, with very little “obviousness” which I find incredibly intrusive. I suspect that in the inevitable 3 disc DVD set, there’ll be copious documentaries and features detailing the incredible lengths the production went to, and to be honest, it shows on the big screen. Compare and contrast with the rushed efforts of Stealth.
On the downside, there’s the small matter of product placement which completely blights this film. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick had some of his characters heading off to a space station in a Pan Am branded craft. I’m sure that Kubrick didn’t take a shilling for what amounts to advertising, but it does add verisimilitude to the setting, so seeing brand names in context in SF films is fine, when it’s done unobtrusively. In this instance, I immediately thought back to the great scene in Waynes World in which Wayne holds a slice of Pizza Hut pizza up to the camera.
In this film, we get very obvious product placement for Puma (seemingly the bad guys’ trainers of choice to outfit clones in), Nokia (if the future of mobile phones involves standing them up and beaming a projection at a wall in front of them, I don’t think I want one), Cisco Systems, Ben & Jerrys and most obviously of all Microsoft. The two heroes play a futuristic Xbox game involving holographic reprentations of themselves in a beat-em-up (Johansson wins needless to say). The system comes complete with exactly the same Xbox logo as we have today – and it’s not Xbox 3600 or whatever iteration they’ll be up to in 15 years’ time. Then later, they need to search for someone, and it seems that mobiles, pocket computers and the like have not done away with phone-box type things, since they enter an MSN Search-box. I swear that there was actually laughing in the cinema, so overt was the branding on this box. Aside from the fact that surely it should be Google that they’re using, the crassness of the camera lovingly presenting the pristine logos for contractual length of time.
We’re media savvy these days, and I reckon that placement such as this actually harms the brand. Still, no doubt Nokia will bring out an Island themed phone, and Ben & Jerrys a new flavour ice cream, and all will be happy. But I did walk out of the cinema thinking more about the fact that I’d watched an extended commercial than a popcorn movie. The future of commercial television is bound to mean more product placement, but indelicately handled, and viewers won’t come back for more. I suspect that the cloning storyline was the bigger problem for US audiences, although coming towards the end of the summer blockbuster season, they might just have been exhausted by the endless explosions and car pile-ups from other FX fare.
So get your big bucket of popcorn, and large drink to sit back and relax with.
Ken Livingstone was at the premiere’s after show party, although I’m not convinced he actually went to the film [Update: These photos rather prove he did]. Maybe I should have barged up to him to suggest my bike plan? Also saw Jimmy Carr, and had a horrible flashback experience of actually living in one of those Channel 4 top 100 shows. Otherwise it was the director, Michael Bay, the couple who produced it (Laurie MacDonald and Walter Parkes), someone who may be from Girls Aloud, and several non-entities (myself included I suppose). The “worst, yet most photographed dress” award must surely go to the woman who was wearing a very brief white dress that she’d then seemingly taken a hedgetrimmer to, to ensure that there was no more than a handkerchief’s worth of material covering her entire body. I find reading the safety warning’s on fire extinguishers slightly more edifying than Heat, OK and the rest, so I remain clueless as to what reality TV show she might have emerged crawling into the light out of the gutter from.