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In this vacant place… hugged by opacity
and a starkly alienating whiteness. You awake…
to a room laden with nothingness…. as empty
as an echo and equally as buoyant (reverbs of
some silent intangibility abound). Your (w)hole
existence floating on an airiness as void as death
itself. You are the flaccid rubber flesh whose
very lifeblood is the amorphous air that predicates
its every movement… or lack thereof; a hollow
balloon inflated with life-you float. You're the
guy in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey;
the one who actually made it to the end of the
movie only to see the futility of his entire stellar
journey towards the "black monolith on the
moon" as he discovers via one bizarre litany
of visions that the black monolith for which he
quested was merely a reflection of an impendent
and haunting dark matter consciousness that encroached
upon the shorelines of his awareness from the
within the intuitive depths of his being (thereby
spawning the need for flight towards aforementioned
black monolith in the first place-typical pathological
search for one's insides on the outside-if you
can dig that). Or perhaps you are Neo sitting
in front of the bleak portal of a black and green
computer screen awaiting your escape from the
banality of your false reality. But now, in the
adept hands of director Michael Bay and writers
Alex Kurtzman and Caspian Tredwell-Owen in the
veritable cinematic achievement that is "The
Island", you are "Tom Lincoln 6 Echo".
You room is white. Your clothes are white. Your
life is handed to you on a platter of liquid plasma
and digital screens while all potential conflict
has been preempted by a precise system of thought
and emotion control, abetted by an insurmountable
police force (sound familiar...), and yet you
somehow intuit (or feel?) that something ain't
right. Your name is Tom Lincoln 6 Echo. You are
played by Ewan McGregor and you are a clone.
As I watched this film, I couldn't manage to get
stirred out of my feet towards anything that resembled
a surge of passion. Enamored as I was by the scenes
unfolding before me across the screen, I couldn't
help but thinking, "Yea this is a nice amalgam
of all the other conspiracy theory/sci-fi flicks
I have seen in the past few years." It filled
all the empty boxes on the checklist of requisite
ingredients pretty quickly. Disparate wandering
loner listlessly stuck in a societal mainframe
quietly senses that something is amiss in his
perfectly constructed reality (Matrix: check,
Stephen King's IT: check, Total Recall: check,
Minority Report: check, nearly any Phillip K.
Dick work: check, and a list of other movies I
don't think I need to get into--you can fill in
the blanks yourself). Aimless protagonist finds
himself immersed in the bowels of an oppressive
regime that supplants the will of the people indirectly,
via mind control tactics and then directly, via
incessant surveillance, overt policing and the
looming threat of mortality (George Orwell's 1984:
check, THX1138 by Steven Spielberg: check). And
then of course, the hope, the dream of love and
possible freedom lying as bait in the form of
some unassuming seductress beckoning said lone
journeyman to venture out from the vault of his
intricately designed 'cubicle' of isolation and
ascend into the open space of life... and for
the sake of a good story, heroism. (All of the
aforementioned titles as well as a host of others
you can think of I'm sure: check after innumerable
check).
So of course you're wondering who the Trinity
is to Neo's 'Lincoln 6 Echo' on The Island. It
just so happens to be our friend from my previously
reviewed Lost in Translation, Ms. Scarlett Johanssen
with her lips-damn-near-big-enough-to-be-a-sista's-fine-ass-self.
She plays the yin to Lincoln's yang (if such can
be said of clones?). It's almost immediately that
we get introduced to Echo's curiosity. I guess
the producers needed to dive head first into the
storyline with all the action-packed scenes that
they held in store for the second half of the
movie (the flick was two hours and 16 minutes
in its entirety). While his automaton friends
are all complacently comforted in the quarantine
hospice in the middle of some Area-51 desert that
they call a world (their makers have lulled them
to satisfaction with the myth that they were transported
to their present dwelling after "the contamination"
occurred, which apparently made the rest of the
world unfit to live in), 6 Echo dares to ask questions
like, "where do the wires lead?" He
and his fellow clones are relegated to mundane
jobs that require them to feed "nutrients"
to tubes that go only Lord--ahem, only their human
creators know where. A diabolical dose of dramatic
irony soon reveals that these wires are funneling
lifeblood to organisms that bear an uncanny likeness
to their very suppliers... dun dun dun dun! You
can almost guess what happens next. Tom Lincoln
probes a little further, one James Bond-ian twist
of adventurous events leads to another, and 6
Echo finds himself dead smack in the middle of
a conspiracy of literally life sized proportions.
Just so happens that he is the walking talking
living breathing embodiment of the conspiracy.
In the not too distant future that encases our
journey to The Island, the rift that belies the
space between the haves and the have-nots of society
has swollen to such astronomical proportions that
while the poor are barely able to afford sufficient
healthcare (again… familiar?), the well to
do are well off enough to not only sustain themselves
while living, but to supplement their existence
beyond the grave. Left in the hands of the "wicked
science" of Sean Bean's character, the corporate
bad guy, human life is as good as bought as long
as the consumer has the necessary dollars. The
mad villain of the story sells human body parts
(especially internal ones) that are created in
his labs and contained in these supposedly harmless
organisms, devoid of intelligence. The little
organ donors look like hideous alien creatures
of some sort but the grotesqueness of their visage
is no match for the by far, uglier truth behind
them. They are mere diversions for the multi-millionaire
clientele which consists of A-list movie stars
and other upper echelon members of society interested
in eternal longevity. He of course has no intention
of letting his bankrollers in on a secret to which
even the government is apparently oblivious-that
the human parts come from-you guessed it, human
clones!
As for the melodramatic means by which a clone
comes to grips with the reality that his is anything
but, you'll just have to go check out "The
Island" for yourself. Just remember when
you go that fantasy and real life aren't too far
apart in this little sci-fi tour de force from
"reality". It's a blast of a movie with
a drama-filled first half and an action packed
second half that seem to belong to two different
movies, they bare such stylistic difference and
switch up in tempo. But when it's all said and
done, you'll have enjoyed an excellent ride with
a pertinent message for our particular day and
age. An age, mind you, where sci-fi and everyday
life seem to share an increasingly compromised
space to the point that it's hard to tell the
one from the other-or if there is any difference
at all. Speaking of all this selling of human
body parts, stem-cell research anyone…?
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