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Multiplex Movie Review: The Island (2005)
This is not as accessible to people who haven't seen the movie as I like these reviews to be, but if you're not familiar with The Island or Never Let Me Go at all, the premises are that clones are raised and educated as "spare parts" — which is just plain absurd. (The idea that such a thing would be allowed by any reasonable society made the premise impossible for me to swallow, except as a very far-fetched Twilight Zone-style scenario. At least in The Island, it was secret and illegal.)
An absurd premise isn't a deal-breaker, though, really. But The Island never lets you go past its implausible premise, because it is constantly trying to explain how it all works in equally stupid ways, further compounded by Bay's typical disregard for logic and continuity:
Once Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) learns the truth about their lives, he goes to the apartment of Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johannson) so they can escape. She greets him at the door by saying, "How sweet! You came to see me off" (I'm paraphrasing some of that)… yet their next scene, moments later, she is surprised and exclaims that he isn't allowed in the female tower (as it's called). This might be able to be explained away by some contrived explanation, but… the two moments feel completely incongruous.
The massive underground facility the clones are kept in is maintained by presumably hundreds of normal human employees (including Steve Buscemi, Sean Bean, and Yvette Nicole Brown's characters) — complete with a showroom for ultra-rich potential clients. Yet Lincoln and Jordan emerge from it into desert with nothing around. No helicopter landing pad, no parking lot… nothing. We even see a helicopter landing pad later in the film, yet it is again nowhere to be seen at the very end of the movie.
Pursued by mercenaries, Lincoln and Jordan end up in a train station. The mercenaries open fire, killing Steve Buscemi, and a panic ensues inside the station… yet Lincoln and Jordan run onto the train with oblivious workers and passengers milling around calmly — and it then proceeds to leave the station as if no one has just gotten murdered… and arrives some time later in Los Angeles, without incident.
Minor or not, the sheer number of them just keep piling up. sigh
This is the last of the Multiplex Movie Reviews I'll be sharing here in the Deleted Scenes blog for the near future. I hope you've enjoyed them!
Patreon patrons and Kickstarter backers will see more of these in their respective feeds come January — as well as the Multiplex: The Revenge bonus comics, of course. (There may even be a few movie review comics during the semester as time permits, but I can't really promise anything. I've got A LOT of work to do for my thesis!)
EDIT: By the way, I wasn't familiar with Parts: The Clonus Horror when I did this strip. (I don't watch MST3K; I can't bring myself to watch movies that shitty, even if there are incredibly funny motherfuckers talking over them.) But several people have told me about it since. These kinds of things are usually largely coincidental (or unintentional) — different people independently arrive at similar ideas all the time. $130 million movies generally don't need to rip off obscure B-movie (or book, or comic book) plots when there are thousands of equally good ideas that they can legitimately use for less money than a settlement.
Tags: Michael Bay, Multiplex Movie Review, The Island
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2015 at 02:25am and is filed under Bonus Comics, Movie Reviews.