Movie Speak! (The Island)

Research has shown that movie names are as valuable in communication as normal English words. To test it, we've removed several nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on from the below review ... let's see if anyone notices.




THE ISLAND
"I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark when he made Pearl Harbor. I miss you more than that movie missed the point, and that's an awful lot, girl. (...) I need you like Ben Affleck needs acting school..." - Team America

I'd seen the trailers and, you know, I figured I'd kinda gotten the whole story: there's a lot of Gattaca people Logans Running around in some kind of giant Biodome complex. Oh, and there's this place called the Island that everyone wants to go to ... and it's bad.

How this all fit together in the movie, I had no idea. It didn't seem like there'd be much of a mystery to it, really. We know something creepy is going on. Clearly, this future world has some kind of catastrophy or weird social structure ... and people are gonna have terrible clone-things done to them ... but, you know, would it make any real sense?

Made by Michael Bay (Bad Boys 2) I figured a lot of stuff blew up real good--but I'd heard the original script was well written and intelligent and they'd I-Roboted it. That, you know, didn't make me want to see it. I figured it would not make any sense.

But I did. It was better than I thought. It kinda made sense.

There's little point in spoiling it: you can go see it yourself if you care about the mystery (and the real mystery of the movie--the mystery that confounds the bad-guys, is never explained anyway).

There are a few points I want to make clear:
1. It's so derivative and, in its way, predictable that it almost moves from copy-cat to homage. The Freejack ending twist is telegraphed like Samual Morse on speed. The people aren't just Logan's Running--things are pretty darn close to Logan's Run.

2. Michael Bay is pretty kenetic. The action scenes are high-energy and that does count for something. He may not have sufficiently apologized for Bad Boys 2 but this is a start. Sure, I didn't buy all of it--a scene where the characters fall off a sky scraper and ... land in a net ... is pretty hard to swallow. Of course the guy who pulls them out doesn't exactly buy it either ("I know Jesus loves you!") so that helps.

3. Sometimes pandering is good. You see this sweet uber-tech automobile and you go "there's gotta be a chase scene with that." There is. You see a big control power-plant and you go "It's gonna blow up." It does. Etc. Maybe it just burned all the way through cliche and came out "satisfying."

4. There are these guns that are clearly supposed to be Tasers. They fire two darts, stick in your skin, etc. But ... then they reel back in! WTF? They can jerk and *hurt you*--but there is no evidence of electrical shock. WTF? Who thought the HARPOON gun was some kind of weapon that a security person would use? Who thinks Michale Clark Duncan could be hauled around by a little fishook in his back? WTF?

5. Green light lasers are cool. Okay, we've said it. You can go to Think Geek and buy a green light laser pen so you can see the beam in the daylight. There. Go buy one. We don't need them hilighted in movies any more. Being able to see the dot is good enough for most laser-sights (this is like we stopped needing smoke to show us the red-light laser beam in the 90's).

Can't happen fast enough.

Oh, and one other thing: I liked I-Robot.

Thank you.

-Marco