NO MOVIE SHOULD BE THE ISLAND

Hoooooolyyyyyy CRAP, The Island is a TREMENDOUS PIECE OF SHIT.

Sorry to anyone who is offended by coarse language. This movie made me so mad, I can't not help but use fowl language to describe it. However, before I start swearing like sailor (do sailors really swear that much?) I want to bring one thing to your attention now that I have seen this movie.

OH and this post is a long one because I felt seriously violated by this film. You might just want to read my Pocket Review of it (http://thepete.com/the-island-2005-2/) if you haven't already.

Now, in my Pre-Emptive Strike Pocket Review (http://thepete.com/the-island-2005/) and in an earlier post (http://thepete.com/the-island-an-original/) I talked about how The Island seemed an awful lot like--well, it doesn't "seem" a lot like, it IS a lot like the 1979 movie Parts: The Clonus Horror. However, up until today, it's only been myself and a handful of people on various movie forums around the 'net who have publically pointed this overt similarity out between the two films. Most of us saw Parts on a now-cancelled show Mystery Science Theater 3000--a show, as many of my readers already know, makes fun of bad movies by quipping over the bad movie, itself. Apparently, at least one mainstream journalist saw the same episode of MST3K that I saw because he has written about the similarity of the two films in [http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/movies/2002394690_islandripoff.html|an article] at SeattleTimes.com.

Here's a clip from the article where he actually talks to the director of Parts:

Reached at his home in Ashburn, Va., "Clonus" director Robert S. Fiveson said Wednesday that he'd sneaked into a preview screening of "The Island" the previous night. "I went in hoping and praying that it was enough different than 'Clonus' so that I could just put my mind at rest and move on, but I can't. Because astonishingly enough, it not only seems to rest on the very skeleton of the film, ... there were enough (similarities) in the movie in the first third that I thought this cannot be happenstance or casual."

Fiveson said he'd known about the numerous Web sites and message boards that have been pointing out the similarities — even of some specific shots: "Subplots, characterizations, even down to the butterfly getting through the filter! And the chase scenes were almost in the same order and same locale."

Well, I don't remember a butterfly in Parts, but I'm guessing he means "even something from the outside world getting through to the clone colony."

So, there you have it. Even the director of Parts: The Clonus Horror thinks The Island is a blatant rip-off of his film. After having seen both, I have to agree with him.

OK, now onto the swearing...

Don't read on unless you can handle some "R" rated language now!

HOLY FUCKING CHRIST, this movie is a COLOSSAL PIECE OF SHIT. Big, steaming, piles of tight, fiber-rich logs of fecal matter--the kind with the sharp-edged nuts that scratch your inner-ass-cheeks on the way out.

Man, this is the kind of movie that makes me want to stop trying to write screenplays. It's just so amazingly stupid, mindless and low-concept, I can barely tell where to begin. It's just a giant montage of action sequences loosely tied together with a vague overall plot that, even in it's vagueness is filled with holes. These holes range from anything from tiny "hey that detail doesn't make sense" moments to GIANT "whoa, the whole premise of this movie is flawed now" moments.

In fact, I think in the future movies will be called "montages" and they'll be 2-hour action sequences with little or no plot weaved around the actions on screen. This movie was almost like this but I'll break down some spoilers in a sec, but first I want to talk about my over all feeling of the film.

The Island presents a future very nearly as bland and uninteresting as the present day Michael Bay's other films present. One of my problems with most modern movies that deal with the future is that there is no imagination to them. The future, according to Hollywood, is bland, gray, flat, and usually features perfect weather, unless the plot calls for something different. This film's future-Los Angeles looks an awful lot like modern LA, only it has less colors, more brand names scattered everywhere (even in the film's Cloneland) but is somehow less interesting than a single drive down an LA freeway.

Sure, there are hanging trains that travel high above LA's downtown, but beyond that, there's nothing terribly interesting about any of it. The few interiors we see look just like a clipping from some architectural magazine. This is how I felt about the futures presented to us in Minority Report and AI, as well. Bland, boring, unimaginative, most films about the future from the last ten years or so have slowly become less and less interesting and imaginative.

All the obscene language in the world can't express how WOEFULLY FUCKING SHITTY the movie's vision of 50+ years in the future look. Now, mind you, I don't need it to be all whizbang-neat. I don't need a world that I wouldn't recognize. But trains with no rails? That's retarded--THEY'RE CALLED CARS, YOU DIPSHIT!!

Then there are these things called "wasps" that are flying motorcycles--that's it. They're EXACTLY like motorcycles but they fly. In other words, they're less interesting speeder bikes from the 1983 movie Return of the Jedi. So, let's think about that for a moment. Here's an idea (flying motorcycles) that was seen in a movie 20 FUCKING YEARS AGO. WHY ARE YOU USING IT IN YOUR MOVIE, TODAY?

"Oh, but in our movies, the flying motorcycles can fly really high and smash through buildings and stuff," says Michael Bay.

OH! The flying motorcycles in YOUR movie fly really high.

If that's all it takes, in your book, to be able to call something an "original idea" then you need to go back to making AT&T commercials. I hate to break it to you, but there's NOTHING original about your movie AT ALL, let alone motorcycles that fly really high.

I reference, once again, Parts: The Clonus Horror. This is a film you, and/or your writers, clearly ripped off for your movie. The irony is that your movie actually makes Parts look like a tightly made, well thought out science fiction tale. Parts was made on a $257,000 budget in 1979. Bay had $120 million to make his clone movie and I'm astounded that he couldn't create a better film than this. In fact, I'd say he should be ashamed that some dude in 1979 could come up with a better clone movie.

What doesn't work about Parts? Mainly, it's dated. Everyone looks like they're from the 1970s. It's also not particularly hi-tech, which we can't entirely blame it for since it had a fairly small budget, even for the time. The acting wasn't great, but it was passable and there were a couple of lame filmic shortcuts taken.

That's what's so shocking about it--I can really stop criticizing it at this point. The quips that are made against it on MST3K are more jokes about what is going on within the movie, as opposed to jokes at the movie's expense. The thing to note here is that Parts: The Clonus Horror has a solid premise, a reasonable script and decent execution. Things follow a logical pattern (known to us writers "in the know" as A FUCKING PLOT) and, in a way, we kind of care about what happens to the characters.

None of this can be said about The Island.

SPOILER ZONE BEGINS

This movie lifts, wholesale, the premise and general structure of Parts. The idea is that these clones are created to supply healthy body parts for their originals out in the real world. You pretty much get that from watching the trailer. One man becomes suspicious and begins asking questions. Finding the answers leads to him discovering the truth of the premise of the movie. The problem is that the audience already knows the premise going in yet the movie seems to think we have no clue because we see no proof of the cloning until the lead character works it out a good ways into the movie.

In Parts, by the way, the very first thing you learn about the lead characters is that they are clones. The first 15 minutes establishes what happens to them so the rest is all about the journey of this guy finding out the truth. It seems like the writer(s) of The Island fell prey to one of the most basic traps in Hollywood--forgetting that people don't see your movie in a vacuum. In other words, they'll not sit down to watch your flick having no idea what it is about. That'd be like the original Star Wars movie not revealing the Death Star until the last 15 minutes of the film. It's like HELLO? IT'S ON YOUR DAMN MOVIE POSTER YOU IDIOT!

The story told to the clones is that they are the last survivors of the human race and must populate a "contamination" free island that is a paradise. (Ah, "contamination"--did you spend a whole MINUTE coming up with that one, Mr. Screenwriter?) The "telling your clones to quest for the ideal" is all great and Edeny and stuff, but once again Parts does it better. In that movie, they are promised to go off to America, which is a land of paradise, where all of your dreams come true.

Which do you think is a cooler way to handle it? Some island is an ideal place? Or America? I'm going with America because that speaks to the irony of "the American Dream" not actually existing for a large number of people inside America. The clones in both films are told that they need to work hard so that they can get to go to America/The Island and live happily ever after. This is also an interesting metaphor for heaven. As an atheist, I really like that comparison because, like the idealized worlds of America and The Island described in both films, I believe that heaven doesn't exist.

So, you can see that there is that same good premise in both films. However, The Island ends up being just a dumbed-down, over-produced version of Parts. For every big dumb action sequence in The Island, there's a perfectly reasonable scene where the lead stumbles upon another reasonably interesting piece of the overall puzzle. (The President, played by Peter Graves actually plays a role in the conspiracy to keep the clones a secret.)

But The Island has high-flying motorcycles and trains with no tracks. This brings me to another, more mundane, criticism of the film. In the future, there are no trains with tracks. They just sort of hover over little pads stuck in the ground where tracks would go in the present day. However, at one point in the movie, the two lead characters hide on the back of a large, flatbed truck hauling train car axles.

Sure, they make for great car-smashing when they are rolled off the back, but they don't fit in the universe of the story. They break the rule that the film sets up: No train tracks in the future. The fact that we see them there is, at the very least, distracting. Was there nothing futuristic that could be hauled on the back of the flatbed?

Joel over at FunJoel.BlogSpot.com points out in [http://funjoel.blogspot.com/2005/07/screenplay-review-island.html|his post about reading the script of this movie] that the wrist bracelets every clone wears should have been tracking devices. In fact, if I was running a top secret cloning facility and needed to make sure my clones were monitored as much as the clones in this movie, I'd implant them with tracking devices under the skin. This is, after all, technology we already have. Yet, even these bracelets they all wear function only to act as sort of credit cards and pass keys that allow them to pass through doors, get food and drinks and so on.

The head scientist of Cloneland (as I call it) begins to wonder why the lead character is questioning so much. His other scientists begin to discover that many of the clones are beginning to question what's up, as well. It turns out that the clones are somehow remembering things from their "sponsers" (as the film calls them). This is something that should have been considered by any scientist who is cloning a person because there have been many cases of people in real life who get organ transplants and suddenly having urges similar to the habits of the organ donors. (Like a little girl getting an organ from a truck driver and days after the operation having the urge for a steak and a beer.)

The fact that the screenwriter(s) didn't include this aspect into their story makes me think they didn't bother researching.

Regardless, the idea here is that the clones aren't allowed to have memories--why, the film doesn't really say. I guess because they'll get unruly and want to escape, but I'm just guessing at that explanation. Anyway, so the head scientist decides to destroy all of the existing clones and start over. The film tries to make a reference to the Nazis here but I just shook my head and said out loud: "Oh, really, movie! It's far too late for the Nazi card."

Of course, the lead finds out about the impending destruction of the clones and the clones having memories they shouldn't is what ultimately gives the film its happy ending. In the meantime this plot device introduces a major hole in the script. When the lead escapes and meets up with his sponsor, the sponsor is kind of a dick and calls the clone police (as I call them) on him. The sponsor doesn't care about the moral implications of clones that are living things dying so that he and others can live.

Now, if the clone has memories of the original, wouldn't the clone be a dick, too? In the end, the clone goes back into Clonus Cloneland, to save his fellow clones. This isn't consistent with the clone's own words at one point where he admits that he'll do anything to survive.

The film puts forward the idea that most humans are cold, immoral dicks who will "do anything to survive" and that somehow clones of us would be caring, sweet, and generous people willing to risk an absurd bladed grappling hook in the back (or worse) to save their fellow clones' lives. This is a pretty dark statement, but of course, I don't think the filmmakers are aware that their film makes a statement at all.

I think they're just trying to appeal to the lowest common idiot out there who thinks cars exploding, people falling off of buildings and somehow surviving, and random-ass shit happening for almost no reason is entertaining. This movie was dumber than a bag of hammers. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this is the FUCKING WORST MOVIE SINCE BATTLEFIELD FUCKING EARTH.

It's really that horrible.

The thing that bugs me about a lot, if not most, of the movies released these days is how little they contribute to Cinema, in general. I've always felt that, unless you have something new to bring to the table, you shouldn't bother telling your story at all.

The Island is a PERFECT example of this rule being broken.

To think there were a handful of people in the theater who actually CLAPPED AT THIS STEAMING PILE!!

This is why I feel like I don't want to try and write movies any more. I don't want to write for this fucking moronic audience that doesn't need anything more than a bunch of explosions and chase sequences to entertain them. Why would anyone want to write for that kind of stupidity?

In at least one way, I think The Island actually can function for something positive, however. After all, in the film the clones, before they are made sentient, are shown rapid-fire video images that teach them how to not think too much and how to be 15-year-olds. I think that's what this film does to those who see it.

In fact, I think that's what a lot of Hollywood movies, TV shows and even commercials do to us. They teach us how to like spectacle, cars that are really boring, OH and most disturbingly (to me, anyway) they teach us to view the future as a bland, uninteresting place.

Imagining the future that way means that we'll be less disposed to trying to make it better. Our expectations are lowered across the board so we think that there is no hope, so why should we bother?

Futuristic films from years past challenged audiences of the time to imagine amazing things for humanity's future. HG Welles' book The Shape of Things to Come was made into a movie filled with all sorts of amazing things we could look forward to. Fritz Lang's 1927 masterpiece Metropolis was another film that broke amazing ground in imagining the future.

Sure, to us, these movies are dated. I'm currently reading Wells' The War of the Worlds and I'm kinda bored by it because the best the aliens have to offer is a heat-ray. I guess a nuclear bomb just hadn't occured to him in the 1890s. The point is that these films looked forward and imagined things that didn't exist at the time. Flying cars, jet packs, spaceships, and so on. Scifi movies of today have nothing fun or imaginative to show us.

It's almost as if the reality of the future that was imagined all those decades ago not coming to fruition in our present day has depressed writers into such a cynical haze that they are unable to imagine a future where neat things actually do happen.

Well, to writers who think the future is a bland, gray place, I say get a clue or stop fucking wasting our time with these bland, horrible stories. I'm sick of movies taking place in the future without there being anything that futuristic about them. Flying motorcycles? Trains with no tracks?

The Island has tiny metal spiders that climb in through the lead character's eye (in a shot directly lifted from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre) in order to scan his brain over a period of many hours. Couldn't he just wear a hat for a day with scanners built in?

Minority Report is a movie that had "futurists" hired by its director to come up with realistic ideas for what the future would look like. However, the best it can do is show us cars that travel up tracks in the sides of buildings to pick up and drop off their passengers. Isn't that about the most absurd idea you've ever heard? TRACKS in the sides of buildings? What if someone leans out there window at the wrong moment? Can you imagine how expensive it would be to build those tracks strong enough to support the weight of a car? Wouldn't it be cheaper to just have a parking garage and make people take an elevator to their cars?

AI was much the same way. The most futuristic thing that movie managed to show us were domesticated robots. Beyond that there was nothing terribly futuristic about it at all.

i, Robot was the same thing. It brought precisely nothing new to the scifi equation. Nothing futuristic about the movie aside from a few robots and there is nothing new about that.

Well, if you haven't noticed already, I can't stop raving about how intensely shitty modern scifi movies is. I could also go on and on about how lousy The Island is. I haven't even gone into how stupid the movie looks when it uses TV-commercial techniques to get our attention. They cut from a rare, calm, talking scene to the clone police on their way by a whip-pan, loud guitar music and jump cuts to different close ups of the clone police black helicopters "intense" flying. (Yes, helicopters in the future--see what I mean?)

This brings me to the music and then I'll let you get on with your life. The music was AWESOME. I LOVED the music, BUT ONLY WHEN I CLOSED MY EYES. The music was so over the top it made the movie look even more silly and stupid than it already did on its own.

Nothing interesting happens on screen yet, it's the theme music from the Go Army commercials--it's that intense.

I liken it to having Anthony Hopkins in a movie with an otherwise ROTTEN cast. Hopkins blows everyone away and makes them all look like shit. Yet, throw another bad actor in there and it's not so bad. The soundtrack to this movie was just like that. It was cool, dynamic and something you can dance to--unlike the rest of the movie.

Now, before I go, just a quick note about the acting. It was fine. Everyone EXCEPT Johansson does their best to make this movie interesting. Now, I know Johansson can act, but in this she didn't bother. Granted, she didn't have shit to work with script and direction-wise, but McGregor at least made choices. "I've got the maturity of a 15-year-old boy--HEY! What's that? That's cool!!"

Johansson just sort of looked confused the whole times. Sorry, babe, you're hot and all, but just because you think the movie is a piece of shit doesn't mean you should just sit back and let your [abbr: DSL - Dick Sucking Lips] and boobs do all the work.

OK, now you can go about your business. Just do yourself and the future of humanity a favor and avoid The Island in theaters and on home video and on pay-per-view and on cable and on broadcast TV.

Just don't ever see this movie.
From SeattleTimes.com:

Friday, July 22, 2005 - Page updated at 12:00 AM

"Clonus" director says he's seen this clone story before

By Mark Rahner

Seattle Times DVD writer

Here's an irony alert — and a lawsuit alert: a new movie about clones appears to be an uncredited clone of another movie.

Director Michael Bay's new science-fiction blockbuster has drawn comparisons to the '70s classics "Logan's Run" and "Coma." But "The Island" looks so much like 1979's "Clonus," aka "Parts: The Clonus Horror" (available on DVD from Mondo Macabro, $19.95) that its director says he may seek a federal injunction to stop "The Island's" distribution.

"Clonus" is an obscure cheapie with a fascinating premise, best known now because of the ridiculing it took in a "Mystery Science Theater 3000" episode. Viewing one after the other will make you do a double take.

In Bay's movie, the closely monitored, mod-clothed, naive residents of a futuristic colony win a lottery to go away to a promised land called "The Island."

In "Clonus," the closely monitored, mod-clothed, naive residents of a futuristic colony are chosen to go to a promised land called "America."

In both movies, a male resident goes on the run when he discovers that the promised land is a lie, and that he's part of a colony of clones being grown to harvest their organs when the rich human originals ail. Both feature an evil scientist keeping his project a secret from the public at all costs by sending assassins after the runner.

Reached at his home in Ashburn, Va., "Clonus" director Robert S. Fiveson said Wednesday that he'd sneaked into a preview screening of "The Island" the previous night. "I went in hoping and praying that it was enough different than 'Clonus' so that I could just put my mind at rest and move on, but I can't. Because astonishingly enough, it not only seems to rest on the very skeleton of the film, ... there were enough (similarities) in the movie in the first third that I thought this cannot be happenstance or casual."

Fiveson said he'd known about the numerous Web sites and message boards that have been pointing out the similarities — even of some specific shots: "Subplots, characterizations, even down to the butterfly getting through the filter! And the chase scenes were almost in the same order and same locale."

What went through Fiveson's head as Bay's movie unfolded?

"I was thinking 'Jeez, this looks so much better than my movie. I wish I had the money.' "

"Clonus" cost $257,000. "The Island's" budget was $120 million.

Press materials for "The Island" tout its "original screenplay," which an enthusiastic Steven Spielberg sent to Bay. The story is credited to Caspian Tredwell-Owen, who co-wrote the screenplay with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. There's no mention of Bob Sullivan, who wrote the "Clonus" story and co-wrote the screenplay with Ron Smith, with an "adaptation" credit going to Fiveson and Myrl A. Schreibman.

Although he's been talking with lawyers, Fiveson said he doesn't know what he wants from "The Island" filmmakers or its studio, DreamWorks. "I'm not in this to make money, frankly." However, he said, "I wouldn't mind if this thing went to a jury trial at all."

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company