The Island
When added to Bad Boys, The Island immediately makes director Michael Bay into a human version of the phrase that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. The Island wasn’t exactly a massive hit at its time (one of the main reasons for that is the same reason that it made it onto this list), but it has hung on for almost ten years now with that sort of flimsy but durable reputation where if you mention it to someone, they’re likely to say “….Oh yeah…..that one where they’re all wearing white suits then suddenly there’s a load of helicopter shots and car chases…..” To be fair, that does just about summarize it. But in terms of its particular area of transhumanism, there have been few films since that been as bold.
Set in 2019 (it amazes me how short a length of time directors give the world to get to the point of advancement they’re imagining. Bay made this movie in 2005 – what did he think we were going to suddenly achieve in just fourteen years?), The Island follows two characters, Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) and Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson), as they go about their heavily routinized lives – along with thousands of others – in a strange clinical environment, which is apparently protection from an event that occurred on earth known simply as ‘the contamination.’
Bizarrely unquestioning of their isolation and strict rules, each member of the community simply waits for the day that a ‘lottery’ calls their name and they are able to leave and go to ‘the Island,’ which they believe to be the last part of the real earth that remains uncontaminated. Having experienced dreams and memories that are not his own, Lincoln eventually discovers that their situation is in fact an elaborate fabrication; a perfectly ordinary world exists outside of their environment, and he and his fellow inhabitants are nothing but clones that have been paid for by wealthy or vain people who, when they experience illness, ageing or any other kind of strain on their own bodies, can simply take from their clones whatever is needed. Lincoln and Jordan escape the facility and thus begin a fight for their own personal survival, regardless of the demands of their ‘sponsors.’
The key words here are ‘their own.’ The Island’s central theme of cloning is actually more to do with therapy than true enhancement; given that the movie’s ‘real’ human beings haven’t yet reached a stage at which their bodies are resistant to failure, they still need to rely on something external to be able to ‘transcend’ the natural human limits as we know them at the moment. But the main issue is still the ethical problem of creating human beings purely for someone else’s purpose – the concept that part of being human involves having an autonomous right over one’s own body.
On its reception, The Island was criticized for being undecided whether it wanted to be a film about the ethics of cloning, or an action science fiction flick, with the movie appearing to be split into two very different parts. But on closer inspection (said no-one about a Michael Bay film, ever), The Island does actually make the effort to strike a fair balance between science fiction and its ethical comments.
It is stated in the movie that there had been some eugenics (more proof here that ‘eugenics’ is still alive and kicking) laws in 2015 that required the clones to remain non-conscious, and therefore crucially non-human, which was how the facility had been able to side-step the ethical problems in the first place. Interestingly however, the scientists working with the clones had found that unless they gave them some kind of ‘life’ – i.e. some kind of interaction, consciousness and activity – the organs taken from them would fail. As well as making a clear comment about the right of human beings over their own bodies then, The Island is actually also making a statement about what it believes a human being to be, and – in a rare case – identifies part of that as actually having a biological yet interactive human body.
Overall, it is true that part of the The Island does still have Michael Bay’s signature mark of making the bull in the china shop look as though he simply stepped in, doffed his cap, had a polite look around and then quietly went on his way again – and it is also true that other movies such as Mark Romanek’s 2010 film Never Let Me Go, and Nick Cassavetes’ 2009 My Sister’s Keeper (both adaptations from novels) deal with almost exactly the same issues in a deeper and more profound way. But Never Let Me Go never quite achieved the popularity of its novel counter-part, and My Sister’s Keeper was such a savage and blatant attempted yank on viewers’ heartstrings that it may as well have been our own organs that were being harvested. In comparison then, The Island remains one of the most accurate and interesting movie comments to date on the limits of what we can do to ‘make ourselves better.’