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Rant Alert!
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Today I saw the film 'The Island'.
We went on a Wednesday afternoon and there were five other people in the cinema.
There was a group of four teenagers who were sitting at the back making loud
comments and a woman sitting behind us who make loud shushing sounds.
The woman won, her shushing noises were much worse than the teen high spirits. The
teen group eventually shut up, but that was more to do with the enormous bangs and
crashes throughout the film as Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johannssen went through
ever more unbelievable ordeals to escape their pursuers.
After falling from a building seventy stories high, Ewan had some small scrapes
along his cheek, and Scarlet had a small cut close to her ear, far enough back not
to spoil her image from the front. And her lip gloss was still immaculate.
Well, I did enjoy the film. Really I did. And it made me think.
I like Science fiction very much. I like to write it and I like to read it.
Written SF is not doing well. Publishers seem to think it is a rather precious
elitist literature on par with Arthurian historical novels. Mainstream it is not.
Yet what are the blockbuster films???
ET....War of the Worlds...Star Wars (how many episodes?)... Star Treck.. (How many
of those?)....not to mention Terminator 1 and 2, the Abyss, Blade Runner..... fill
in the blanks.
Make a mainstream movie - SF over half the time.
Write a main stream book? Steer away from SF it just isn't saleable (or so they
say).
Anyway, this film had a serious idea at its heart.
What kind of consciousness would a clone have? Is it inferior, just because the
other one was there first? How do they learn to love and to exist?
This could have been a great movie, but Michael Bay went the blockbuster way,
turning it into a series of noisy chases and near escapes from a mean looking ex
SWAT bad guy, controlled by Sean Bean as the Scientist who wanted to be God.
Every bad scientist wants to be God, they ought to weed them out at University
entrance, then they would never get to learn all the complex stuff and try to rule
the world.
Why does Sean Bean play all the bad guys now?
He started with the bad guy to Pierce Brosnan's James Bond, tried to steal the Ring
of Power from Frodo in the Fellowship of the Ring and here he is again sneering at
Ewan McGregor and trying to kill him.
Steve Buscemi was his usual eccentrically great self (why do they always put him in
the credits as 'with Steve Buscemi? What is his agent playing at?
He had all the good lines, including, 'You know who God is? You know when you really
really want something and you ask for it? God is the one that ignores you.'
Sean Bean take note.
Michael Bay wasn't sure he had a action thriller, an SF classic or a comedy (The
clones couldn't read a telephone directory, and they didn't know what sex was, but
by God Ewan McGregor knew how to drive a Star Wars Storm Trooper type motorbike
through the New York Skyline without any instructions. This is clearly hard wired
into the Y chromosome.
And this was the first of many nods in the direction of Star Wars.
(And it looked like the attack of the Clones at the end, or was that the Indiana
Jones children escaping from 'The Temple of Doom'?
There was also a nod at James Bond at the end when they were off together in a boat,
she wearing a wonderful white dress that would be the last thing you would take on a
boat, but oh well, clones don't have much fashion sense.
The film still made me think about ho we will deal with clones and what rights they
will have when eventually we are able to produce human clones. Maybe not by 2019,
but not the far distant future either.
'The Island' was a nice metaphor.
The clones wanted to get to the island, it was their ultimate Paradise a sort of
Thailand Beach without the psychotic hippie encampment, or Leonardo di
Capprio,
(needless to say Sean Bean had them killed, there was no Island for them).
What 'Real' humans were searching for was immortality. This was their
Island, and
that is one thing I think Michael Bay got right.
The film is fun. See it.
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