E-Mail This Article to a Friend Send in the clones Michael Bay’s Island getaway; Richard Linklater’s underachieving Bears BY PETER KEOUGH
	THE ISLAND Directed by Michael Bay | Written by Caspian Tredwell-Owen + Alex Kurtzman + Roberto Orci | With Ewan McGregor + Scarlett Johansson + Djimon Hounsou + Sean Bean + Steve Buscemi + Michael Clarke Duncan | A DreamWorks release | 127 minutes BOSTON COMMON + FENWAY + FRESH POND + CIRCLE/CHESTNUT HILL + SUBURBS
	Bay watch Michael becomes a political filmmaker like . . . Jean-Luc? NEW YORK CITY — Who’d have thought that the most political movie of the summer might be a Michael Bay thriller? Certainly not the filmmaker himself. In fact, it looked for a while as if Bay might not even make it to the junket for the film. He was nowhere to be seen during the morning interviews. Informed of his absence, Walter F. Parkes, the producer of The Island and co-head of DreamWorks, looked nonplussed. "He likes to party," Parkes admitted. Nonetheless, Bay slouched into an afternoon press conference paired with Scarlett Johansson, who, her blond hair brushed back in a ’60s bob, might have been Anna Karina circa Alphaville next to the ashen, unshaven Bay’s Jean-Luc Godard. But there, as Johansson discussed the rigors of the film’s action sequences, the resemblance perhaps ended. "Of course, when you’re reading a script and it says, ‘slides down a drainpipe,’ you don’t think that’s actually going to happen until 7.30 in the morning on the day when Mr. Michael Bay is just going, ‘So you just slide down this drainpipe, and then we’ll do it again from another angle, and again from another angle.’ Some of the days we had were really long, and I’d kind of look at Michael and be like, ‘I can’t do it again!’ But he was very sensitive about it and would go, ‘Just ONE more, just ONE more, I know you can do it!’, and I’d be like, ‘Fine . . . ’ And then I almost lost an eye, that was fun. Did you see the playback of it? It was so close." "I did," Bay replied. "When they’re riding the wasp [a flying, futuristic motorcycle] through the building . . . " "And we weren’t harnessed into this wasp!" "And Ewan’s cojones," Bay added. "When the ramp went off, it was a little harder than we intended . . . " "He was in agony!" "It threw Scarlett forward, and she hit her head on the wasp." "It was very close to my eye." "But she’s tough, I gotta tell you. She was hanging on that giant ‘R,’ from a wire, about 30 feet up . . . " "It was just to defy you." Back to the politics. Doesn’t The Island, like Alphaville, touch on contemporary issues? Stem-cell research, abortion, class politics? From his expression, Bay seemed to see the box office plummeting. "What I intended was to have the audience think, would you, if you could, have a clone? If there were a facility like this, I’m sure there are enough selfish people who would. It’s a universal theme in this movie that we all want to live longer, but how far would you go? It’s not to comment on stem-cell research; it’s amazing how they feel they can cure so many diseases. This is just taking cloning in a sci-fi way to the ninth degree. It’s just to open discussion, that’s it." How about class conflict? The bad guys in the film are all rich, ruthless, and selfish. The good guys are poor and downtrodden. The clones themselves are all duplicates of people who seem mostly wealthy, entitled, and white. "The concept was, the facility is going to start off really expensive, and maybe it’ll come down later, just like with DVD recorders, it’ll drop in price. I did have a lot of foreigners there, that old Japanese man, looks like he runs Tokyo bank. I had lots of tall people, like a basketball player. I put a rapper in there." "There’s Michael [Clarke Duncan, in a truncated role as a clone]," Johansson chimed in. "He was a football player. We think these are the people who could afford this $5 million policy. I thought it was what it was supposed to be. "I don’t believe movies deliver messages. I don’t pick movies for the message. I think when you leave the theater, you question, how far would I go to test fate? But when I come out of a film I’ve paid $10 to see, I want to be entertained. You want to say, ‘That was cool, I had a lot of fun, that was an entertaining experience for me.’ Films that always have to deliver the big picture, it’s so boring, especially if they’re offensively preachy." _PK RELATED LINKS The Island's official Web site The official Web site of Michael Bay

Long before cloning became the controversial cutting edge of science, it provided the template for Hollywood success: high concept, adaptations, remakes, sequels. Originality? Too great a risk. Independent filmmakers like Richard Linklater struggle to adapt to the system, sometimes subverting it, more often compromising themselves. Generic technicians like Michael Bay thrive.

This weekend the pair release contending blockbusters. Bay offers a film about cloning, Linklater a clone of a film. Given Linklater’s past success with kids in School of Rock and Bay’s track record of mind-numbing success (his last two are Bad Boys II and Pearl Harbor), Bad News Bears would seem the likely winner for originality, if not at the box office. Maybe some exchange of creative genes took place, however, because News is old whereas The Island seems like a brave new movie.

Not that it’s original. Within 10 minutes, a half-dozen other movies come to mind as Bay plunges into a nightmare involving a boat, Scarlett Johansson in white, watery doom, and a rapid-fire collage of barely recognizable images. Then Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) wakes up, but to what? A Spartan but tasteful cell in a monochromatic beehive of childlike people in white jump suits. The décor and the costumes evoke Metropolis, The Time Machine, 2001, and Sleeper. The enigmatic, sardonic tone recalls the Terry Gilliam of Brazil and Twelve Monkeys. And when the story gets under way, so do other comparisons: THX-38, Logan’s Run, The Matrix . . .

For Lincoln Six Echo, though, it’s all new. As played by McGregor, he’s nearly a blank slate, but with an edge of indignant curiosity. He’s been told that he and his fellows are survivors of a worldwide disaster, rescued, rehabilitated, and sheltered from the poisoned world outside in this secure if regimented community. What they live for now is to be chosen by "The Lottery" to be sent to "The Island," where all their desires will be fulfilled. In short, he’s received the same indoctrination as most of us: the world is a fallen place, but if we behave, we’ll go to Heaven.

Meanwhile, Lincoln has a few questions, like who launders the jump suits and what is the meaning of life? Merrick (Sean Bean), the dour but kindly head of the community, invites him into his office, which is decorated with monochromatic abstracts by Picasso and Franz Klein. (In a Michael Bay world, such tastes are sinister.) He reassures troubled Lincoln and inserts tiny mechanical spiders — leftovers from Minority Report? — into his eyes.

Lincoln’s uneasiness nonetheless intensifies. He’s drawn to Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson), so much so that he’s close to committing "proximity." He also has an illicit liaison with McCord (Steve Buscemi), a guy in greasy overalls he meets up with in the grimy pipe work behind the facility’s sleek façade. McCord offers a different kind of friendship — something is unsaid behind his mouthing of the familiar platitudes. He also offers snorts from his hip flask of whiskey.

Inevitably, through various little clues and coincidences, Lincoln is led to traumatic revelations, primal scenes disclosing the truth about his birth and destiny. He and Jordan flee to the world outside, which turns out to be a Michael Bay movie with car chases and astounding action sequences. This time, though, the action has significance and wit as well as volume, wreckage, and body counts. One sequence involving a giant capital "R" is especially surreal and absurdist, and all the stunts have a satisfying physical logic, if not probability. I was a little disappointed, however, by the climactic scene in which a giant, illusion-producing holographic device must be destroyed. Too close to representing the Dream Factory from which Bay earns his fortune, I guess.

The real surprise is Bay’s subtle, subversive subtext — not just old chestnuts like appearance-and-reality but down-to-earth issues like abortion and stem-cell research. (The film could be seen to support arguments on both sides of these issues — which may be the point.) True, there’s Bay’s old bugbear of characterization — in particular the unlikely conversion of certain characters from good guys to bad guys. But these inconsistencies almost make sense if you see the film as a parable about class conflict. Lincoln and Jordan (the names are not arbitrary) aren’t just alienated from the products of their labor, they are the products. Those who recognize their kinship with them win a different kind of lottery.