The Island

Michael Bay’s 2005 film follows Lincoln Six Echo inside a sealed compound whose residents are told the outside is contaminated and that a lottery sends the winner to the island. The lottery is a harvest queue. The trouble is the promise, not the pace. The opening lays out the compound’s routine and the ritual of the draw; then the escape begins, the film shifts into Bay’s freeway register and cloning ethics never reopen. Ewan McGregor plays both the clone and the sponsor who ordered him, the second half’s best idea. It collapsed at home: 35.8 million dollars domestic against 162.9 million worldwide. In Slate, Edward Jay Epstein blamed the campaign, not the film. DreamWorks opened on over 3,200 screens and spent 35 million dollars on ads that never conveyed the story, or even that there is no actual island in The Island. The makers of Parts: The Clonus Horror sued DreamWorks for copyright infringement; the court refused to dismiss it and the sides settled confidentially before trial. A good fit if you treat the closed world, its rules spelled out one by one, as the real film and the chase as a bonus. Not for anyone who wants the organ harvesting question carried to the end; it closes the moment Lincoln gets outside.