So, not too long ago I was told by a friend of a friend if I could write like I talk I could review TV and movies and make money doing it. The problem is I think quite quickly and thats when I come up with my most whitty comments. But I type and write so slowly I forget all the gems I come up with in the correct order before I can get them down. Then I am disappointed that the perfect idiom for any occasion is lost, because my brain works faster than I can get it down. With that in mind I am going to attempt a review of a movie I recently watched and become slightly obsessed with,
The Island. Here are a couple of things you need to know, one I am going to include spoilers so if you want to watch it and be surprised by any event minus the ending dont read any more, and two to explain this movie I feel you need a basic understanding of 3 other older movies, which at this point I am going to assume people have seen and just need a refresher on the information that is important to
The Island.
The Island is a combination of three other movies, The Matirx, GATTACA, and Never Let Me Go.
Never Let Me Go, is a small time film that most people have never heard of or seen. I only saw it bc it was on the 5 for $20 bin at the Blockbuster and I needed another movie, I hadnt seen it, and Kiera Knightly is in it, cool lets give it a go. Well, here is the general synopsis of that movie, its about 3 friends who are growing up in an orphange type environment, 2 girls Kathy and Ruth and a boy Tommy, obviously you can imagine how that particular part of the plot takes over ::enter love triangle::, but the twist here is these kids are not in an orphanage they are in a facility to help them grow up to be medical donations. As they age they have surgeries to remove organs for transplant to other more priviledged people. Really they arent people at all but property they never say if they are legitamitly clones or if they are just manufactured. There are only two was to escape having all of your organs donated out, first a deferral - a temporary reprieve from organ donation for donors who are in love and can somehow prove it or become a carer, a "clone" who is given a temporary reprieve from donation to do the job of supporting and comforting donors as they give up their organs. I am not going to bore you with every other detail of this long sad movie the point is that in this alternate universal humans use and view other "humans" solely for the purpose of personal salvation and infinite health.
The Matrix is a movie I hope everyone is familiar with, if not either go back to the hole you just crawled out of or go watch it immediately! Basic premise, a future where AI has taken over and humans live out there lives in cocoons merely being fuel for the machines that rule the world, there is however a group of people who live outside of the virtual reality that are trying to find the one person who can put an end to the machine oppression.
GATTACA, well this movie is very clever. I saw it for the first time in school, a science teacher showed it, notice how the name is all caps and only consists for 4 letters? Well, those 4 letters make up the sequences of your DNA. This movie takes place in a future/alternate universe where humans have stopped breeding naturally and have their children genetically engineered to be perfect combination of the parents DNA, in other words nearly everyone is a test tube baby. BUT occasionally someone is born as a "love child" and they are then considered "invalid", making everyone else valid. The actual story line in the movie isn't important just the world.
So, here is how those ideas all meshed into a Michael Bay film-
The Island.
The movie opens in a very clean futuristic facility and we meet Lincoln Six Echo as he wakes up, we follow him through his morning and then through his day. Within a few minutes of waking we see a "lottery" drawing, where one member of this society is chosen to go to the island. They explain that this world is the survivors of a world contamination and they all believe they survived and are rebuilding society, but they cant leave the facility due to the contamination outside, they believe the only safe and clean place outside the facility is the island and the only way to get there is by winning the random lottery. Obviously this all seems a little too good to be true, plus why are the peoples diet, exercise, UV exposure, etc all so closely monitored? And my big question was what about all these fools working there? Did they survive the contamination and how come they cant win the lottery???
Well, the answer is they are clones. This is a future where humans can pay a ridiculous amount of money to have a clone made to extend their life 60-80 more years, or your clone can carry your baby etc. BUT the people who are buying the clones are told that the clones live in a vegetative state and do not have feelings, emotions, or thoughts, they are merely a "product". The clones even work in the facility helping to make the next series of clones. One aspect of this movies concept is that the clones are brought to life at the age that the person is scanned, so a 50 year old person gives a clone that appears to be 50 but is merely a few years old. They then live there life in the facility until they are chosen, once they are "birthed" from the cocoons they are made in they are shown a video that brainwashes them to believe they had a normal life and childhood before the contamination. It also tells them they are special and have a purpose.
I was going to go in to depth about the rest of the movie but I don't want to ruin the end for everyone so I will just stop there. If you are intrigued you should go watch it!
BTW I wrote this in 2014 and apparently never published it so its old, lol.
