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Last Friday I watched The Island, the new sci-fi action flick starring Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson and directed by Michael Bay. I don’t have time this week to offer a detailed analysis, but suffice it to say that it’s pretty bad.

Despite the presence of quality actors (I spent the entire film trying to figure out where I’d seen Ethan Phillips before), there was very little time for, you know, acting. The vast majority of the film involved enormous, incongruous action sequences. I know I shouldn’t expect any more from Mr. Bay, whose previous credits include cerebral projects like The Rock and Armageddon. He seems to specialize in taking films with promising premises and making them as idiotic as possible.

On a related note, here’s an interesting commentary on the shameful product placements in the film (including a truly bizarre, meta-cinematic reference).

I did want to list some of his worst sins. Most of them relate to his clumsy approach to the sci-fi genre.

NOTE: After the jump, THERE ARE SPOILERS. SPOILER ALERT! (THERE ALSO BE SPOILERS IN THEM THERE COMMENTS!) If you’re going to see the movie, you probably want to wait to read my bitchy complaints.

To reiterate: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!

• The first third of the film is a bald-faced rip-off (plot, set, costuming) of George Lucas’s early film, THX-1138.
• It’s at least 50 years in the future, and there have been incredible leaps in the biological, medical and genetic sciences. Yet the cars people drive (and the helicopters) and the guns they wield look more or less identical to 2005.
• However, a couple of these villains have these nifty jet bike things lifted from Return of the Jedi. Why doesn’t everybody own one?
• In the period from 2005 to 2050, no one has introduced a single word of slang.
• In order to get an ‘insurance policy’ clone, you have to pay $5 million. Considering inflation, that seems far too little. I’m guessing that five million 2060 dollars might equal one million 2005 dollars. If your clone kicks around for 20 years, you’re only paying $50,000 a year. Surely Sean Bean’s evil corporation isn’t making any profit on that.
• The clones actually aren’t a very good insurance policy. If I get a clone made when I’m 35, and then get inoperable cancer at 40, odds are that the clone’s going to have cancer too.
• There’s a scene involving a technologically advanced and very intrusive ’synaptic scan’. When they get the results back, they look hilariously like a 2005 (or 1995) CT scan of one’s head.
• Along the same lines, the villainous mercenaries–led by the excellent Djimon Hounsou playing yet another Magc Negro–run a street-by-street facial recogntion scan for our heroes. Eventually they’re spotted with a ‘93% match’. This absurd, as we’ve got the technology today to complete a 99.9% match. Combine that with the computational clout of 2060, and you could monitor every human in Los Angeles in real-time. No scan would be necessary.
• If I’m running a top secret clone farm, I’m going to use something a little more robust in the way of tracking devices. Easy-to-remove bracelets aren’t going to cut it. I’d, I don’t know, embed something under their skin.