“I brought you into this world… and I can take you out of it.”

Chad’s rating: It’s Logan’s Run but with clones.

Chad’s review: It’s great fun when your favorite director steps outside their comfort zone to flex their creative muscles. Watching Michael Mann take the grit from his many urban police procedurals to 18th-century colonial America was enormously effective in The Last of the Mohicans. Or James Cameron framing the horror of one of the great maritime disasters through the eyes of young, star-crossed lovers in Titanic. And who knew that Ridley Scott could channel such feminist rage with his subversive and stylish Thelma & Louise.

Michael Bay, the maestro of such hi-octane, action-heavy blockbusters like Bad Boys, The Rock, and Armageddon was on a roll in the late 1990s. Bay is a director who embraces mainstream sensibilities with no shame whatsoever. But even a director specializing in cliches and plot holes isn’t immune to taking a few big swings. And he did in 2001 with the historical romance Pearl Harbor, which was set during the Japanese attack that brought the U.S. into World War II. It was a movie so bad and riddled with historical inaccuracies that even veterans of the actual attack criticized it.

After the critical drubbing of Pearl Harbor, Bay’s follow-up in 2005 was the science fiction thriller The Island. This was a much better effort, with Bay toning down some of his worst instincts as a director. Where Pearl Harbor lazily copied the Titanic rule book, The Island is a stylish variation that brings a fresh spin to the cyberpunk genre. It’s fascinating to watch the director tackle a cerebral, thought-provoking sci-fi story that explores the moral implications of human cloning. And he almost pulls it off. This could’ve been his Blade Runner. But Bay’s blockbuster sensibilities get in the way, diluting the complex ideas the film wants to tackle.

The Island is set in an undisclosed dystopian future where a group of humans work in an enclosed facility, living a relatively calm and utopian life. Yet they are heavily monitored with constant health updates, allowed only to eat certain foods, and subject to a separation policy between the sexes. It’s a comfortable prison, essentially. Every once in a while there is a lottery where one lucky inhabitant is chosen to go to the “Island,” the last uncontaminated place on earth.

However, one worker, Lincoln Six Echo, begins to push against these restrictions, triggered by strange dreams of him being on a yacht in the ocean. He finds himself attracted to the beautiful Jordan Two Delta, a friendly co-worker who takes a shine to Lincoln. This calls undue attention from the facilities director, the cold and clinical Dr. Merrick, who wants to know more about Lincoln’s weird nightmares. Complications arise when Jordan wins the next lottery, leaving her friends and her growing attraction to Lincoln behind.

Later that night, Lincoln sneaks out and explores the restricted zones of the facility, where he learns the cold truth. The year is 2019, and the surface of the Earth is just fine. But all the “workers” are clones of the elite and ultra-wealthy. And the Island lottery is just a cover for the clones to be harvested when a rich “sponsor” gets a health ailment and needs to extend their life. The clones are essentially living insurance policies for the one-percenters.

Lincoln immediately finds Jordan, and through a series of unbelievable mishaps, the pair escape into the real world of 2019. Their childlike nature and fish-out-of-water antics bring them unwarranted attention from the authorities. The clones realize their only hope is to find their “sponsors” and expose the illegal activities of the Merrick Biotech corporation.

Of course, this being a Michael Bay movie, our beloved clone couple is not only being chased by the police but also by an elite squad of mercenaries hired by Dr. Merrick to return his escaped “product.” Apparently, Dr. Merrick is breaking several eugenics laws by harvesting adult clones billed to their sponsors as being grown in a mindless vegetative state. It seems the clones die prematurely when not sentient and conscious. Even worse, Lincoln Six Echo is starting to inherit the dreams and memories of his sponsor, which should be medically impossible. But these carbon copies may exude more humanity than their human-based originals.

The Island shows much promise during the first hour, where director Bay tamps down his pyrotechnics to craft an intriguing cyberpunk mystery. There is no doom scroll text describing a dystopian future nightmare. Instead, we are dropped in the middle of the action letting the characters build the story. These early scenes recall sci-fi classics like THX-1138 and Logan’s Run, with our heroes longing to break free of their metal prison and seek out the truth. We see Lincoln and Jordon’s sweet chemistry through a few short scenes since the sexes are discouraged from mingling.

Bay’s switch to this more low-key style reveals a director who can add complexity through pure visual imagery. There’s a great bit where Lincoln catches a moth and places it in a glass prison not unlike his own. Or Jordan watching her sponsor for the first time in the real world, as she was cloned from a famous supermodel. She stares awestruck at a huge monitor showing her mirror image starring in a splashy Calvin Klein commercial, showing the clone of the things she could experience. And Lincoln and Jordan react sweetly when they see tiny children for the first time, as they are essentially children themselves.

Sadly, Bay throws this restraint out the window during the second half, as all hell breaks loose once Lincoln and Jordan escape the cloning compound. It’s here where the film turns into a full-blown action spectacle, featuring many slow-motion shots of characters walking dramatically toward the frame. The deadly mercenaries led by Djimon Hounsou manage to level several city blocks of future downtown L.A. during an extended and over-the-top chase sequence that features flying hover bikes, steel piping falling from diesel trucks, and characters dangling off the side of skyscrapers. I will say that Bay stages these sequences in a clean and straightforward style, eschewing the herky-jerky camera movements he would adopt in his later movies. But they’re so overblown that they clash with the more emotionally layered tone of the film’s first act.

We do get a chance to see Ewan McGregor shine in one of his rare mainstream action projects. This was McGregor’s first picture after wrapping his fan-favorite turn as the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequels, and he shows real leading man chops as Lincoln Six Echo. He’s essentially playing a dual character when the clone meets his more sinister human counterpart. The actor adds some nice flourishes, like switching between Scottish and American accents of the tech bro sponsor and his innocent clone. McGregor is nicely paired with Scarlett Johansson as Jordan Two Delta, although she doesn’t get much to do once the action starts. Johansson was still an indie darling at this point in her career, although she would break out a few years later as the Black Widow in Iron Man 2.

Unfortunately, The Island future dates itself as the “2019” Los Angeles resembles nothing like the city some three years later. I should know since I work in downtown L.A. and there are no cool hanging metro lines, sleek ass street signs, and flying hoverbikes that would make my morning commute so much easier. I mean, the screenwriters of 2005 sure are a hopeful bunch, but this looks to be about 50 years off from what we have in 2023. And while cloning was a hot-button issue in the late 1990s, we haven’t even attempted to create human copies yet.

The Island is a frustrating watch as it’s a movie brimming with fascinating ideas. What would happen if we could successfully clone a human being, and how “human” would they be? The film also touches on the stem cell research debate during Lincoln’s horrifying discovery of clones being ripped apart for spare body parts in service of their sponsors. There are some overt calls to Blade Runner with its “more human than human” biotech corporation and fake memory implants, causing the clones to question the nature of their existence.

But Michael Bay will have none of that, as he takes this fascinating update of Logan’s Run and gives it a high dosage of explosive action. Despite the wild swings in tone, there’s some good stuff here, and it’s an outlier in the Bay filmography. Sadly, audiences all but ignored The Island during the summer of 2005, and it remains one of Bay’s most costly flops. And reportedly, Bay agreed to direct the Transformer franchise in light of the film’s failure, in what would be a long and fruitful relationship with the robots in disguise.