The Island Review

11/11/06



Alright, saddle up ladies and gentlemen because I’ve got some knowledge to drop on your asses. For those of you who’ve seen this steaming pile of nonsense you have my deepest empathy. For those who haven’t, there are spoilers ahead, but if you were thinking about watching this film in the first place you should probably just go ahead and cram the business end of a broom into your ass now; it would be less painful.

First of all, the entire premise behind the film is just dumb. Thousands of clones are created and housed as organ harvesters for the rich and famous in a secret facility. So, if I understand it correctly, we have medical science capable of creating functioning, viable human clones we somehow age to adulthood in a matter of 2-3 years, but we can’t grow a simple human liver in a dish? I dunno if you know this or not, but it’s harder than Ron Jeremy on Viagra to clone a human. In the movie they say the Department of Defense has given the facility $120 billion dollars, on top of the $5 million per clone they get from each person wishing one grown. You expect me to believe that with that kind of scratch it’s not easier to learn how to grow individual organs instead of secretly cloning entire people, feeding and housing them, hiring thousands of staff to control and maintain them, not to mention look at yourself in the mirror every morning knowing your butchering human beings because some actor drank his liver into cirrhosis? Yeah…that seems much simpler.


That’s all before we have to keep all this quiet! The public doesn’t know about it, of course, but you’re telling me not one of the people working for this organ farm has a moment of guilt and moral quandary and blows the whistle? It’s not just the hundreds of people smart enough to get through medical school that have no moral compass; there are the guards, the cooks, the janitors, the maintenance workers and out of all these thousands of people nobody every let slip about the disgusting human carnage going on in an old military bunker underground? This place has been around a minimum of seven years, because the oldest clone in the movie is said to be seven years old. For fuck’s sake, President Bush couldn’t even keep the secret wire tapping out of the public eye for, what, five years tops? And that didn’t even involve cutting someone’s heart out while they trustingly look up at you like a doe-eyed Anime character.


The movie is supposedly set in 2019, but in a scene where the director of the clone facility is talking to potential clients he mentions a law “of 2050.” (Just a side note here, in the commercial played for the clients the narrator says, “the human organism…perfect in every way except one: like any machine, it wears out.” That’s kind of like saying, “the water’s perfectly safe to drink…oh, except for the cyanide poisoning.”)

Whether it’s 2019 or 2050; either one have their problems. If it’s 2019 that means that in 13 years we went from unable to keep a cloned monkey alive for more than a few months to totally viable human copies. Not only that, but we have levitating trains, hover bikes, fingerprint scanners for door locks and fully-contained holographic video games like a la the Holodeck in Star Trek. That’s a fuck of a lot of progress for a half-generation time span! And if it’s 2050 we go back to the whole problem of “why can’t we clone individual organs again?”

The pseudo-science in this lark must have been written by a retarded chimp on heroin because it’s all over the fucking map. Ewan McGregor’s character Lincoln had his clone made because he has hepatitis and his liver is failing; we can clone and super-age people but can’t cure hepatitis? It’s about at this point you need to beat yourself in the face with a hammer just to choke down the fact that the clones are even up and walking around in the first place because “keeping them unconscious causes the organs to fail; the clones need life experience.” I guess a lung will just give up the ghost if it doesn’t feel “fulfilled” in life. AGGGHHHH!

Lincoln 6 Echo’s (Ewan) questions about his existence reach a head whenever he sneaks into the hospital above the compound where they take the clones who have “won the lottery” to harvest their organs. He reaches this supposedly most secret of secret areas through an air duct, which he later uses to ludicrously easily escape the entire compound. Hey, secret death-base, here’s a tip; maybe (A) Don’t make the air ducts large enough to drive a Mack truck through and (B) Use something more secure than a simple plastic lock to prevent your clones from skedaddling; Lincoln 6’s owner has a fingerprint pad for his house for godssakes. But I digress.

Lincoln sees several clones murdered, the most idiotic of which is Michael Clark Duncan, who wakes up in the middle of the surgery and sprints down the hall before being dragged back to have his liver vacuum-packed. What the fuck are they using for anesthetic in the future? A rubber mallet to the back of the head? DAMNIT!


Speaking of escaping the facility, Lincoln drags Jordan with him when he escapes with absolutely no question from her. She even bashes one of the guards in the face with a wrench despite the fact that, you know, the clones were “bred to be non-violent and complacent.” After the couple emerge into the outside desert, we get the joy of watching the Michael Bay-i-est chase scene ever to be burned to celluloid. Bay single handedly strangles suspension of disbelief to death as the clones

1. Survive having the cop car they’re riding in cut in half by an armored truck
2. Jump onto a passing semi truck
3. Survive the poorest-aimed machine gun fire on earth
4. Kill the pursuing hover-bike pilots
5. Steal hover bikes (which they can now drive, apparently)
6. Drive bikes through a damn building
7. Finally crash-land into a sign hanging from said building
8. Survive more badly aimed gunfire
9. The sign detaches from the building and falls 40 stories
10. And finally land safely in a construction site net


Wow. It’s later explained that Lincoln knows how to drive because he has residual memories from the dude he’s cloned after. ‘Cause genetic memories are possible now, apparently. Pseudo science! Since this is getting long, let’s do a rapid-fire list of some other idiocy.

1. They find Jordan’s benefactor’s number in the phone directory, despite the fact that she’s a famous actress and would definitely have a private number.
2. Lincoln’s number isn’t in the phone book, oddly.
3. The man-hunter sent after them is told to keep a low profile, but turns downtown L.A. into a war zone and murders cops in cold blood.
4. The “train wheels” dumped off the back of the semi in their escape wouldn’t bounce down the road like that; they’d punch through and just stick.
5. It’s hazy how old the clones are; Lincoln is told he’s three, then five, then later a clone in the same Echo series is told he’s seven.
6. Puerile ruses still work in the future, apparently, as the merc sent after Lincoln is fooled into shooting the “real” Lincoln when the two are standing next to each other. “No, he’s the clone!” “No, he is!”
7. Sex drive is suppressed in the clones. Why? Uhm…BECAUSE!
8. It’s either 2019 or 2050 and Lincoln destroys the entire complex by throwing one lever. Nice.

The product placement is just wildly out of control in this movie, but I guess that’s to be expected when Michael Bay and Stephen Spielberg are involved. Among others, Michelob Light, Aquafina, Cadillac, NBC, MSN and Puma are prominently displayed alone on screen for huge swaths of time.

















Back to hell, demon!


One final point and I’ll let us all get on with our lives. Almost nobody in this abysmal movie has any redeeming qualities whatever except for the hired mercenary who suddenly has a change of heart at the end of the movie because the plight of the clones remind him of his family’s persecution in Africa. This is the same man who gunned down innocent police men in the streets. Perfectly reasonable.



Despite containing some of my favorite actors, this is a very bad and confusing movie.