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What the clone lovers find is a new world -- it's 2019 -- of highway collisions, flying motorbikes, exploding buildings, bad acting and moral incoherence, very much like old Bay movies.
Since Michael Bay never knows when enough is enough, every chase is restaged over and again and the narrative matrix is as simplistic as it is repetitive.
You have Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, these terrific actors reduced to saying, 'Go, go and duck' and hanging from buildings and all that stuff. And it just falls apart.
The Island is nothing so dull as a total failure. But it has enough surprises up its clingy white sleeve to make you wish it were better.
If you find yourself at The Island I have only three words of advice: Vote yourself off.
If The Island qualifies as cheese deluxe even by Michael Bay standards, it's because it's the only one in his lavishly decadent oeuvre that actually pretends to trade in ideas.
...all high-tech and flashy, with a loud, pounding musical track beating us into submission. (Blu-ray edition)
For the second half of the film, it's all chase and chase and chase some more, with little audience involvement in how it turns out.
The Island is very much a Michael Bay film, with all of the stylistic touches that entails.
A stunning futuristic thriller about cloning and immortality, The Island combines spectacle with controversy.
Loud, fast explosion movie...best for teens and up.
The pace of this roller coaster ride becomes too furious to remember that it all started out as an adventure addressing some pertinent ethical issues about the pitfalls of stem cell research, cloning, and bio-genetics.
Actually a fairly decent sci-fi thriller for its first half.
It seems to assume that its audience is made of idiots, constantly reminding us of the simple plot details and having characters define things for each other.
... a darker, R-rated sci-fi dramatic cut of The Island exists somewhere... buried right next to the only copy of the Schwarzenegger-free print of The 6th Day.
The film remains a patchwork of clichés -- evil corporations, evil Frankenstein-like scientists, and so forth -- which is the one kind of cloning that Hollywood does accept.
Bay must have taken one look at the sci-fi script with its overtones of bleak Orwellian dystopia, and thought, "I wonder how many car crashes I can cram into this."
heart-breaking experience for all the fans of classic science fiction films
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