Supersonic Strap-On

THE ISLAND

Directed by Michael Bay

Like every auteur, Michael Bay has a signature:
an eardrum-rattling BOOM that coincides with a smash-cut to characters driving really
fast or bashing each other’s brains in or running through a dimly lit corridor while someone shouts,
“Go! Go! Go!” The BOOM is Bay’s dimwit version of Spike Lee’s people-mover shot—a
dubious filmmaking “innovation,” seemingly devised to allow non-film-geeks to identify Bay’s
work from the other side of the tv showroom at Circuit City. It’s a bully’s transition, the directorial
equivalent of smacking someone in the face to make sure he’s paying attention. Sadly, Bay’s unbroken
string of hits—even Pearl Harbor grossed $450 million worldwide—suggests
that viewers, when slapped, will take it and like it.

Bay’s latest, The Island, is another BOOM fest, a migraine-inducing
sci-fi thriller about prisoners in a contaminated future who live in a hermetically sealed city
and hope to win a lottery that will deliver them to an island paradise. Ewan McGregor is Lincoln Six
Echo, a mild- mannered gent who dares ask why certain people get chosen for the lottery and why some
of his coworkers supervise a creepy network of feeding tubes and why he found a butterfly in an area
that’s exposed to the allegedly contaminated air outside. Scarlett Johannson is Jordan Two Delta,
a babe who fills out a jumpsuit even better than Lois Chiles in Moonraker. Together they
rebel against The System (personified by Sean Bean’s psychatrist-controller, Merrick) by deducing
that the city’s Purgatory/Heaven mythology is a scam, then plotting their escape.

The conspiratorial tropes and the Logan’s Run-meets-Tony
Scott production design situate The Island within a familiar sci-fi subgenre, the anti-authoritarian
fantasy, and confirm the plot will offer few surprises. But a real filmmaker can weave even tired
elements into a ribbon of dreams that snakes through the viewer’s imagination and connects with
life. Think of Blade Runner, which is basically Raymond Chandler’s Metropolis with five (possibly six) Marias, or Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, which on paper
sounds like just another futuristic thriller warning, “Be careful what you wish for.” Through
meaningful compositions, primordial symbolism and prescient production design, Blade Runner became a melancholy contemplation of death, globalization and the possibility of mechanized
souls, while Minority Report explored the consequences of letting government play daddy,
the different meanings of the word “visionary” and the kinship between conspiracies, dreams,
voyeurism and moviemaking. (When cop John Anderton stands before his hologram screen and sifts
through police data and Pre-Cog imagery, he’s equal parts detective and film editor.)

After Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and Bad Boys 2,
it goes without saying that The Island is inferior not just to Blade Runner or Minority
Report, but to almost any big budget sci-fi film of the last 30 years. (Spielberg deserves partial
blame for this dystopian horse apple; he sent Bay the script and lured him away from regular producer
Jerry Bruckheimer to direct it.) Bay is a serial abuser of CinemaScope, and this movie’s images
rank with his cruddiest. Some of the most kinetically important moments are sloppily composed,
cluttered with welding sparks and strobe flashes, and filmed with such absurdly long lenses that
they become an objective correlative for Bay’s shallowness. The Island is the kind of nine-figure
monstrosity that invites critics to take turns bashing it like a piñata. To quote Slant magazine’s Keith Uhlich, “I think we’re far enough along in our civilization that the following
can be stated with absolute authority: all Michael Bay movies are evil.”

But rather than keep swinging until the candy falls out, let’s instead
study the piñata’s construction and try to discern why Bay’s work is so insubstantial and
yet so menacing. Shorn of every type of connective material (intellectual, geographical, moral,
rhythmic), his films sprint from peak to peak (or as hack action writers might put it, from whammy
to whammy), herald both big and small moments with hysterical fanfare, and treat plot points not
as a springboard to introspection, parable or poetry, but as chronological signposts that mean
exactly what the script says they mean and nothing more. Bay’s movies render emotional and intellectual
participation unnecessary. They aren’t cinema, but the opposite of cinema.

Cinema doesn’t feel and think so you don’t have to. It invites you to think
and feel for yourself—not by inundating the viewer with exposition and connect-the-dots
psychoanalysis (qualities canonized in Batman Begins) but by presenting images and situations
that are playful and exact, yet open to interpretation, or at least engagement. Cinema means more
than it says or shows; it has a life beyond what’s contained in each frame; its fundamental and deliberate
incompleteness is an endless provocation to reflect, interpret and dream. Why, exactly, did Travis
Bickle kill all those people? What, exactly, happened to Dave Bowman at the end of 2001?
We don’t know, exactly, and we’ll never know. The films’ images provoke questions and associations
while discouraging reductive answers. That’s why we can’t stop thinking and talking and writing
about these movies.

The Island doesn’t invite reflection, or even in-the-moment
free association. With its action-figure characterizations, frenzied glitz, galumphing score,
Schwarzenegger kiss-off lines and incidental homophobia and sexism (I counted at least two effeminate-menacing
characters, and poor Johannson is made to play a scene validating the idea that women can’t be trusted
with credit cards), it’s actively hostile to thought itself.

Without spoiling the movie’s faux surprises, let’s just say that in
better hands, the conspiracy, once revealed, would have inflamed modern fears that the body is
becoming a malleable husk, that recent medical advances are just another way for the rich to exploit
the poor, and that consumers won’t trouble themselves with thoughts of exploitation, much less
indict themselves for selfishness, if they’re getting what they want at a decent price. But Bay
treats the conspiracy as nothing more than an arbitrary succession of markers. As soon as The
Island discloses its narrative particulars, it flushes them like spent condoms and fixates
on tedious, viscerally abusive chases, fistfights and explosions, and product placement for
Johnnie Rocket’s, Ben and Jerry’s, Puma, Aquafina, Cadillac, Calvin Klein, Apple, Michelob,
Budweiser, Speedo, Nokia and, I kid you not, Amtrak. (Minority Report‘s product placement
was obnoxious, too, but at least Spielberg fused it with the movie’s privacy-invasion themes and
made it funny.)

There’s no mystery or poetry in The Island—no images
as sweet and personal as the Wonka Bar monolith in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or
as unnerving as the long shots of pastoral landscapes overrun by arterial ivy in War of the Worlds (an occupation literally nourished by blood) or as corny-haunting as the wordless scene in Revenge
of the Sith—a downer 70s epic for nine-year-olds—where Anakin and Padme, separated
by several kilometers of Coruscant real estate, seem to stare into each other’s eyes (like that
moment in Heat where De Niro senses Pacino watching him through infrared goggles). Bay
can’t summon that level of invention because his brain doesn’t work conceptually. His moviemaking
vocabulary is all action verbs and exclamation points. He’s a medulla oblongata with an
eyepiece.

Exhibit A is a long, witless chase involving a jet-propelled motorcycle.
It plainly aims to one-up Spielberg’s jet-pack scenes in Minority Report. But where Spielberg’s
set-pieces were witty (the flame-broiled burger) and translated surveillance-state power into
fairy-tale visuals (the Pre-Crime cops scampered through the sky like the Wicked Witch’s flying
monkeys), Bay’s jet cycle is just a supersonic strap-on. The sonic booms on the soundtrack aren’t
quite the Dolby Digital equivalent of horsemen’s hoof beats, but they’re chilling all the same—a
Pavlovian illustration of Bay’s belief that sensation equals feeling: the sound of cinema imploding.