The Island

We went to see "The Island" yesterday, to find a movie starting out with a great concept and finishing as another lame second rate action movie.

If you haven't seen the movie, do not read further - This rant Is a bit of a spoiler.

The movie starts out with a society living a weird, forced, monitored life in a big cylindrical establishment: When the character first wakes up he is told that he is having bad dreams again, his urine is tested when he goes to the loo, causing his daily meal be sans meat. During the day he will see the establishment's head doctor, who will try to understand the character's dream.

Also, all the people are living their lives waiting to win The Lottery, a ticket to The Island - A utopia made up for them to wait for so they would live a happy, quiet life trying to achieve passage to. The world is destryoed and The Island is the only place surviving. Everyone want to win the lottery, they are being forced to think that from "birth". Social contact is minimal and is discouraged, inspite of what the heads of the establishment would say: "Proximity" is against the law.

Eventually, the character and the viewer discover that the whole establishment is just a facade for a life insurance company of the worst (or the best) kind: The grow human replicas, clones, of the insured people so should something happen to them (infected liver, heart problems, etc) they would get a transplant from their best donor: Themselves. Obviously the insured are unaware to the fact their donors live a life before being cut to shreds in order to supply them with body parts, so when the character finally escapes this establishment with a female clone, they try to find their origin and tell them of what is really going on.

This is where the movie goes terribly wrong: Instead of having some clever, phylosophical endeavour, they go off in a wild run to a random location, to find themselves in the most common of action movie scenes: First the horrible bar scene looking for clues, then the cars chasing a truck with heavy things falling off it scene, followed by a flight scene, on to a car chase scene, to the obvious sex scene, and then to the commando scene where they come back to the establishment, two people who lived for merely 4 years at most, and stop a whole army sitting there to defend the place. If that wasn't enough, the movie gave us a final "the-bad-guy-is-having-second-thoughts" scene where the one chasing them all along, killing (in numbers) around half the population of Israel on his and their way, decides to help them out at the last minute and they all save the day.

Oh, I almost forgot the scene where he meets his origin, and they have a fight, and there is a guy pointing a gun at them, and they argue about who is the origin. Classic.

Sigh... I just wish movies could start AND end with a good idea...