Hollywood headlines today mourn the mere 12 million or so taken in by the sci-fi action thriller, The Island.
We saw The Island this weekend … and we were very pleasantly surprised.
To be fair, this movie is anything but original. The Island borrows heavily — okay, let’s be frank — it steals heavily from other, better films. Remember that great scene from Bladerunner, in which one of the Replicants finds out her childhood memories are merely implants, lifted from the experience of a real human being? That scene is also in The Island — almost ver batim. Remember the frantic highway chase scene in the last (and otherwise completely forgettable) Matrix movie? That scene’s here, too. The ending of the movie — right down to the compostion of the helicopter-mounted camera shots circling the survivors — is stolen from Logan’s Run.
Despite the blatant plagarism — or, perhaps, even because of it — The Island works. When the plot gets thin, the direction patches the holes nicely with clever, ingeniously-filmed action sequences. When the action gets tiresome, the movie slows down and focuses on the plight of its characters. Underneath the all eye-candy and the sci-fi props, this movie is asking important questions about what it means to be human, and who gets to make that decision for us.
Mark my words: The Island will be one of those movies that folks in the next year or see on DVD for the first time and say, “Wow! When was this at the theater? Why didn’t I see it then?”
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