Movie Review: The Island

In an effort to make my blog a little more useful, I've decided to add some reviews from time to time, starting with movies and maybe restaurants... all from the canine perspective of course. I'll start with a movie I watched yesterday (God Bless you PVR)... The Island.

The Island stars Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson. According to my good friends over at Wikipedia, The Island was a bomb in North America, but actually did OK worldwide. (Read the Wikipedia page here for a plot synopsis... I won't repeat it unnecessarily here.) I thought it was OK, but there was a lack of original ideas in it.

The beginning smells a lot like a book I read once, Brave New World, with characters having names including a first name, a number, and a phonetic designator (e.g., McGregor plays Lincoln Six Echo). There are bits of many other movies too. A couple of chase scenes reminiscent of both Terminators 2 and 3 mixed in with a few Demolition Man moments. ("John Spartan, you are fined five credits for repeated violations of the verbal morality statute.")

Also, because there are 2 characters who look the same as one another, there's the classic scene we've all seen in dozens of movies and TV shows, ranging from the mediocre Travolta-Cage effort Face/Off, to The Parent Trap (either generation), to Jet Li's The One, to Phoebe and Ursula on Friends, to Knight Rider (where Michael Knight had an evil twin, Garthe Knight and K.I.T.T. had an evil twin, K.A.R.R.). Kinda like Degrassi too... Which one's Heather and which one's Erica?

(At the risk of sounding obsessed with doppelgangers, what with all this twin talk, check this out anyway. It gets my point across beautifully.)

The final movie that I would like to highlight as being stolen from in the making of The Island is the heart-wrenching drama Street Fighter, with an ensemble cast led by leading Belgian thespian Jean-Claude Van Damme (but also featuring Raul Julia, Ming Na, and Kylie Minogue!). If you've seen The Island, and if you've seen Street Fighter - and really, who hasn't - then you'll know the scene I'm talking about. If you don't want to know, I'll try not to spoil anything, but maybe skip the rest of this paragraph. In one scene in The Island, they are brainwashing new members of the Utopian society by flashing many short jerky images directly in front of their eyes. This is very similar to how, in Street Fighter, Charlie Blanka is brainwashed into becoming a killing machine in Dhalsim's laboratory.

The funniest part of The Island to me is when Lincoln Six Echo (McGregor) is in the outside world for the first time and sees a motorcycle speed by. Jordan Two Delta (Johansson) asks "What was that?" And Lincoln answers, starting right into the camera, "I don't know, but I want one." To me, this is a funny reference to McGregor's 18,887-mile motorcycle trip from London to New York, travelling across Europe, Russia and North America to get there the Long Way Round (official site).

Overall, I give it 4 cookies. (I'm not yet sure what my rating scale is, but 4 seemed like a good place to start.)