The Island

Critics and film fans hate Michael Bay with a passion. He makes the most mindless summer movies with huge plot holes and one action scene after another. Audiences love him though, I do too. Armageddon is one of my top 10 favorite movies and The Rock was pretty great too. I hate Bad Boys and its sequel though.
Now he brings us The Island, produced by Steven Spielberg (instead of Jerry Bruckheimer who's produced all of Bay's previous movies), a sci-fi adventure about clones who find out what they are and escape the fortress that keeps them captive without them nor the other millions of clones that live with them knowing.

Ewan McGregor plays Lincoln Six Echo, and he's been in this place for 2 years. He's been questioning everything for some time now, like why do they always wear the same white clothes, why aren't they allowed to touch other people and even more stupid stuff like where are the tubes he fills every day with something he doesn't know what it is going.
He also questions the titular Island, a paradise he and everybody knows exists but they can't go to. They all want to go there because it's supposed to be the only contamination free place in the whole world, which suffered something like a huge contamination a long time ago, everything is dead, and so that's why all the survivors (like them) are in this facility like they're in quarantine.
The only way to get to The Island is by winning the lottery, so they all gather in the hall and watch these huge screens where all their names and faces are shown and then it randomly stops and one person wins and goes to The Island. There's another way to go there and that's by getting having a baby in which case the mother gets to go too.

Scarlett Johansson plays Jordan Two Delta, she's a friend of Lincoln's (that he'd want to know better) and wins the lottery the same day he freaks out and decides to escape the place (taking her with him) after finding a bug (which are supposed to be all dead) in the ventilation system. He was not supposed to be there, but he has a friend in McCord (the marvelous Steve Buscemi), who works for the corporation that has all the clones in there. McCord and Lincoln talk every day without McCord saying anything about the outside world since that would get him probably killed.
The facility is run by Dr. Merrick, played by Sean Bean, a man who thinks he's god because he has developed the science that allows people to live forever he says. Rich people of course, because these clones are expensive, and so if they get sick or they can't have a baby and want one, they can just go to this place, get themselves cloned by Merrick's people, and whenever they need new organs (or when the baby is born), their clone will win the lottery, go to the non existent Island, and doctors will take the organs of the clones (killing them) and give them to the sponsors as the people who get a clone are called.
Michael Clarke Duncan plays Starkweather, one of the first clones we see who wins the lottery, to then wake up in the movie of a nightmare as doctors are cutting him up in the operating room to give his organs to the football superstar he's a clone of.

The idea is just fantastic, and the movie works really great. The first 45 minutes or so are used to show Lincoln's curiosity and how everything works, and it's very entertaining and even serious for a Michael Bay movie. Then the escape happens, in a very thrilling action sequence which was my favorite part of the movie. From there on Bay gives us an hour of chase scenes with very minimal dialogue. This gets a little repetitive, specially since one of them is a total rip-off of Bay's own Bad Boy 2's chase scene. Lincoln and Jordan are being chased by Albert Laurent (played by Djimon Hounsou), who's hired by Merrick to hunt them down without the authorities nor the public knowing because that would make the company lose money and its reputation would be destroyed.

What's really great are the special effects, you don't even notice them. I specially loved a scene that little bug like machines go into Lincoln's eye and we see a close up of them getting inside the eye and I was expecting to see those computer eyes you always notice but it didn't happen. The effects are also great in the chase scenes with stuff like flying motorcycles and trains.
Another high point is when Lincoln meets his sponsor, and we get 2 Ewan's on screen at the same time. Sure, there's lots of play with the camera angles but in some brief scenes both of them are together and you can't tell that Ewan doesn't have a twin brother. Excellent work by ILM here.

And that was something weird in the movie. I'm not exactly sure what year is the movie supposed to take place (I think there's a mention to "The Laws of 2050"), but the world portrayed there is pretty much the same we have now, plus the aforementioned flying vehicles. But all the other stuff looks like today's world. And little imagination with a few of the product placement used because they have an X-Box at some point in the movie and it's the same logo they have these days, but we all know next year the X-Box 360 (or something like that) will come out so they should've invented a new X-Box model for the movie or at least used the 360's logo.

And I need to comment more on the product placement because the story's kind of anti-corporation but it fails completely with so many products used. I read that Bay went over budget for the movie, and so he started calling his friends asking them for money in exchange for product placement. I think it was like a million dollars for it. And so we get massive advertising in the movie, for stuff like MSN Search and X-Box (both Microsoft products), Cadillac, Chevrolet, Mack Trucks, Budweiser and so much more. Even Scarlett's real life commercial for Calvin Klein makes into the movie, though it's used as part of the story and not just to get money for it (though I'm sure they got some).

Michael Bay knows what he's doing with these movies, and I love that he doesn't care about critics (though a couple early reviews by the big ones have been positive) and makes his movies for the huge audiences that go see them.
And this movie is smarter that his previous films, as the story contains some nice ideas about the cloning science and the character's reaction to what they are and their interaction with the real world is done really well. Still, the movie has pretty big plot holes, and the ending, though poetic, doesn't make sense because it wouldn't work at all. And one of the main characters changes sides in a split second and even though we get the reason, the turning point happens way too fast.
Still, The Island has great acting, amazing visual effects, big explosions and even bigger chases, making it a thrilling ride and another winner from Michael Bay, at least in my book.