The Island

The Island is basically Logan’s Run meets Coma: A sterile, sexless society of unwitting body part donors lives in blissful ignorance while waiting to win transportation out of their brave, dull world to the paradisiacal “Island”, the leadership’s cover for their sinister organ-snatching program. That is, until one clone (Ewan McGregor) discovers the Awful Truth and makes a two-hour, action-packed run for it, taking his supermodel platonic friend (Scarlett Johansson) with him.

Scarlett Johansson in “The Island”
Indeed, the entire movie is disappointingly platonic: There’s absolutely no nudity in this movie, and what titillation there is appears only very briefly. Moreover, it’s been widely reported that while Scarlett Johansson was perfectly willing to work topless for this movie, director Michael Bay declined in order to avoid an R rating. Which is too bad: Scarlett looks her glamorous, blouse-stretching best throughout this picture (she’s the clone of a model, after all), but $20 is a high price to pay for a pretty but PG-13 face on the big screen.

Scarlett Johansson in “The Island”
The bottom line: Scarlett handily steals the movie — I especially liked the “perplexed dog” cocked head thing she does throughout it (something she does now and then in her other films, too) — but a turd is still a turd, no matter who steals it. The Island is what Logan’s Run would be if the latter film had its brain, heart, and genitals surgically removed: a soon-to-be-dated sci-fi flick with little social relevance (despite the fertile philosophical ground The Island’s premise offers), little reason to care much about the outcome of the last two thirds of the film (which is more or less one continuous chase scene), and no casual sex and nudity. In short, everything one could want from this movie has already gone to The Island, leaving only cable-worthy dreck behind.