Though the wretched Star Wars prequels are thankfully over, Michael Bay makes sure that the attack of the clones continues with The Island, a loud, odious sci-fi spectacular that employs the director’s trademark incomprehensible action for a paranoia-drenched story condemning stem cell research. In the foreseeable future, pretty Ewan McGregor (with a pretty awful American accent) and even prettier Scarlett Johansson (far better than this trash) live in a hermetically sealed complex, two of the remaining survivors of a global ecological apocalypse that’s contaminated the atmosphere save for an idyllic paradise called The Island that certain people are granted access to via a lottery. Curious cat that Macgregor’s Lincoln Six Echo is, he soon discovers that the whole thing is a sham: the complex’s residents, including Johansen’s gorgeously pouty Jordan Two Delta, are clones being harvested to help cure their original, identical counterparts out in the real world. As with most of his abominable output, Bay’s superficially glossy film is rotten to the core, exuding the surface sheen of a perfume ad – though, as he already proved with Bad Boys II, the director knows how to flip a car during a high-speed chase – and an ethical repugnance in which stem cell research is turned into Frankenstein-ian mad doctor science that’s a crime against both humanity and nature. The Island eventually winds up implicating villainous cloning doctor Merrick (Sean Bean) in a holocaust-style “recall” of his defective flesh-and-blood “products,” thus concluding the film’s wholly fanciful equation of stem cells with mature, conscious beings. Unlike his replica protagonists, however, it’s Bay’s repugnant film that shows no sign of intelligent life.
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