There are a lot of reasons why a movie might be underrated, and sometimes those who think it’s the actors’ fault are those that don’t want to take the blame for failing to do whatever they could in order to make the movie work. We’re looking at you producers, especially when it comes to The Island, since the producers of this movie had the audacity to state that Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor weren’t stars at this point in their careers. Someone obviously wasn’t paying much attention since both actors were already climbing the ladder to major stardom and had proven themselves in the past, no matter whose opinion was being listened to. The act of trying to pass the buck on this one falls squarely on the producers who were responsible for the types of things that can make or break a movie and really don’t fall under the responsibility of the actors. After all the actors are there to make the characters and the setting come to life and make sense together, not to necessarily hype the movie and write a script that makes sense or convince people that it’s worth watching. Nice try attempting to pass the blame, but unfortunately it might have worked in this case since they masked their footsteps a little too well.
The Island has a pretty simple premise, it has to do with a bunch of people that live in a very cloistered existence because they’ve been told that the outside world has become too contaminated to support life any longer. But as you can guess one of them gets a bit curious after he starts having dreams of a life that’s not his own and yet feels so real that he can’t fully deny it. When he goes searching for the reason behind this the fun really starts since he discovers that there’s proof that the outside world is not as contaminated as he and the others have been led to believe. Plus, he comes to find out that being selected to go to ‘the Island’ is not so much a reward as it is a death sentence. He and the rest of his fellow human beings are clones, created for a specific purpose and used when needed to harvest their organs for the individuals that they were cloned from. If this didn’t raise a number of ethical concerns about humanity then the manner in which they’re treated as cattle might since their only purpose in life is to be kept on standby and to be used when the original humans they’re copies of fall ill or need a transplant. Once this is a discovered Lincoln and Jordan seek to escape and find a way out as they seek to integrate themselves into humanity. Jordan’s original is in a comatose state and won’t recover, while Lincoln’s original pretends to help them only to turn them over to the authorities. When the original is shot however Lincoln assumes his identity and continues to run with Jordan at his side.
Of course they’re hunted throughout the movie since it can’t get out that clones are being used or have become aware that they’re being grown and harvested just for a single purpose. They do receive help as they go along but a few people do have to die in order for their secret to finally get out. By the end of the movie they’ve freed their fellow clones and told them the truth, and as a result life becomes a little different for the lot of them and Lincoln and Jordan go on their way, seeking a new life wherever they might find it. As a science fiction thriller this movie might have been a little tame but it does raise a lot of ethical concerns since animal activists might see this is as a very large bit of irony given that humans tend to see fit to raise, farm, and slaughter livestock on a regular basis. This is a bit different however since no one is eating the clones, at least we hope not, and they’re being harvested for spare parts essentially when their originals happen to need an organ replaced. That’s a far cry from farming an animal for food.
The reason this movie is underrated however isn’t because McGregor and Johansson hadn’t yet hit their top stride, as they were both popular during 2005 and had already proven themselves a few times. It had more to do with the lousy way that this movie was presented and the lack of any real hype it received since it had a very solid premise and an exciting plot, but the follow-through when it came to marketing the movie was so poor that it’s not much of a wonder why it faded away just as quickly as it appeared.
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