Ray Pride

Let us define how there could be such a creature as "a great Michael Bay movie."

Roger Ebert recently defended his awarding of stars to certain genre pictures like the Adam Sandler remake of "The Longest Yard," but "The Island" doesn't require any equivocations. While in many ways the 40-year-old director's latest movie may be the esthetic equivalent of genetic splicing, his first time working outside of the Jerry Bruckheimer compound, collaborating with producer Steven Spielberg (who gave the script to Bay) and gifted cinematographer Mauro Fiore, finds him working with intelligence and uncommon agility, exploiting and elevating everything bright and inventive in his compulsive, propulsive set of skills. Plus, PG-13 may be the best friend a boy ever had, reining in much of Bay's previously demonstrated gleeful love of profanity, sexual disgust and general bad taste. (As in the critical fave, "Bad Boys 2.")

"The Island" is a terrific surprise, a rousing entertainment, with room for notions about moral responsibility, marvelous offhand production design of a potential near-future, and as the film accelerates, action scenes that are eye-widening kinetic marvels. (There's a QuickTime clip of one swell burst of action at this link: http://www.dreamworks.com/trailers/island/clips/island_clip7_qt_640.mov). It's almost as if Tom Tykwer got his hands on an Andrew Niccol script--can you imagine the dour anxiety and moral conundrums of "Gattaca" done in the pluperfect bubblegum fashion of "Run Lola Run"? (I consider that a vast compliment.)

Before delving into the plot, which has a few sturdy twists (especially involving identity indicators within DNA), it's worth repeating a lengthy quote from a piece by René Rodriguez in the Miami Herald, from Bay's first film professor, Janine Basinger, chairwoman of Connecticut's Wesleyan University Film Studies Department: "I often joke that my tombstone will read `She taught Michael Bay.' ... But I don't think Michael Bay is the devil. I think he's a good filmmaker. He was an award-winning photographer as a high school student, a fully defined visual artist as a kid, and I don't think he approached the medium with the idea of pleasing other people necessarily. Ingmar Bergman said, `Every great filmmaker has to define film on his own terms,' and in a sense, that's right... For Michael, it's about pace and rapid movement. Michael is actually an abstract artist in the way he uses time, space, light and color. He's almost an experimental filmmaker in that regard. He uses the medium in the fastest, sharpest way that it can be used, and if you don't like it, tough luck.''

In an enclosed complex like the blandest and most expensive of health spas, Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson are members of a community of workers whose only dream is to win a lottery that sends them to "The Island," "nature's last remaining pathogen-free zone." (They believe they're the only survivors of a biological apocalypse.)

There are surprises in store, and a few are given away in the next paragraphs. In fact, they're "agnates," clones manufactured at a cost of billions of dollars by a cool, calculating doctor played by Sean Bean, to provide the possibility of longer life for the very wealthy of the mid-twenty-first century. Originally, the agnates were kept in a "persistent vegetative state." (The film was shot before the legislative attempts to sustain the life of the late Terry Schiavo.) But the flesh held no life: our story begins.

At first glimpse, Scarlett Johansson's otherworldly voluptuousness is accentuated by a glassiness that makes her even more of an image from a magazine page, her features as glossy as lip gloss, a David LaChappelle moist dream. On the other hand, Ewan McGregor is lit to show every texture, blemish, acne pit. Making this pair exemplars of genetic perfection is an almost comic notion, even if at PG-13, Mr. McGregor is unable to indulge his custom and flash his sword.

But the intended fate of the characters is sour. They're only a few years old and have the emotional level of 15-year-olds, minus a sex drive. What does the lottery actually hide? McGregor's character has a defect: curiosity. After a nerve-jangling succession of plot turns and intense scenes, the pair escapes, on the run across the Southwest toward a lovingly designed Los Angeles, in search of their "owners."

Bay's post-"Blade Runner" Los Angeles, cobbled from downtown L.A. and downtown Detroit, is a treat, making sparing use of airborne electric streetcars, and managing to design a scene of Harold Lloyd-style peril from many stories above the street, with characters clinging from a single letter logo whose letterform resembles that of the enigmatic billboard in Antonioni's "Blow Up."

But as you would expect in an authentic Bay production, Steve Buscemi is on hand as the Keeper of the Exposition, playing a run-at-the-mouth horndog, and after hours, yes, he does hang out in a blue-collar strip club. As he spouts to his girlfriend, "Remember the talk we had about all the talk?" and "Why do I have to be the guy who tells the kids there's no Santa Claus?" And "Just because you eat the burger doesn't mean you want to meet the cow."

Like "2001," "The Island" is rife with brand names, more for the bottom line than any reliable futurism, reportedly raising a million dollars toward the $130 million budget. Aquafina remains a reprocessed tap water of choice and information kiosks are emblazoned with the MSN butterfly, a logo that will surely have as short a life as a real butterfly or at least the Pan Am and Bell System logos in Kubrick's movie. Gloriously, but most improbably, Amtrak still runs across the desert heartland, but the vehicle is a Maglev train, sleek, levitating, lovely.

Breathless but hardly heartless, "The Island" is filled with neat details. And when the fated lovers discover the essentials of reproduction, Johansson's quiet raspy murmur is choice: "Wow." That tongue thing is amazing." And so is "The Island."

"The Island" opens Friday.

(2005-07-21)

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