It would not be particularly difficult to make “The Island” into a better film. However, for this Film Forensics, I will attempt to be realistic: when a film has a budget beyond a certain size, the studio that makes it will invariably attempt to reduce risk. They will try to broaden the audience as much as possible, and if the filmmaker does not have the clout (or desire) for creative control, the result will often be a film that only slightly entertains even the most generous of audiences.

Let us assume that we are in the lucky position of being a producer for The Island, then. Test audiences indicate the film will not be profitable if made as it currently stands. What do we do?

There are a couple of easy things, first. The fall from the building (where they are hiding inside the big letter “e”, which falls off the side of the skyscraper) is ludicrous and brings the audience out of the film. There is no indication that our heroes ought to survive the fall through any action of their own. Even luck does not seem to account for it. The only reason they walk away is because they are the heroes, and if the heroes die at that point, the profits go down. It’s easy to see what they want with the scene: a big action set piece that will thrill and which will look good in the trailer. And there are many things we could do to make the scene more entertaining. As it is, they hide inside the “e” while the people above shoot at them, and while the helicopter tries to get close enough for its sniper to shoot at them. The people above eventually shoot the “e” off the building altogether, which then hits the chopper. Everything falls down in a mess; the heroes end up in some netting after falling about a hundred metres and survive. Trivially, we could increase the tension: the jet craft, instead of immediately falling away, could also be caught up in the logo. It has broken in half, and no longer supports two people: the heroes instead point the jet part at the helicopter and let it go. It crashes into the chopper, which in turn crashes into the logo, dislodging it. The people above are still shooting down at the logo. Our heroes try to escape into the building, but they can’t find a gap big enough. The logo tips and rotates, our heroes following inside the centre of the enclosed “e”, and finally falls. The people machine-gunning the sign from above give up shooting. Our heroes prepare for their doom, but then notice that the other half of the jet craft – the half that has the seats – is still in the “e” with them, and has a compartment marked “Emergency.” Why wouldn’t a futuristic jet craft have some kind of emergency safety equipment? And it turns out the be a giant airbag, which (as the fall, and active it) inflates around them both in a giant sphere, which bounces gently on the ground, rolls away a bit, and deflates. Or else it has some other cool futuristic escape device – a jetpack, or futuristic base-jump parachute.

Another simple change would be to fix the initial escape from the enclave. It’s much too easy for them. Guards swarm everywhere, and are completely ineffectual. There are no locked security doors on the silo exit. Our characters walk for about a day and are not caught by the team with helicopters, despite making no effort to hide, and walking along the road. However, we can make the escape more plausible. We know that both the characters can fight well, at least in their VR games – let them use that for real against the guards (and be amazed at how much it hurts). Scarlett’s character is yet another in that long list of heroines who shows her kick-arse skills in the first ten minutes, and then doesn’t use them for the rest of the film (though she does get to use a wrench, and threaten people with a gun. It’s a step up). Let’s overturn this silly rule, if we possibly can. Have them both with some notion that they’re escaping to somewhere incredibly dangerous: that the world is not only radioactive, but filled with hideous beasts, as they see on the videos. They dress in radiation suits, take fresh water, weapons, and other supplies, and are cunning about hiding. It takes them a while to realise the outside world isn’t radioactive, and longer to realise that they face more threat from the enclave guards than from the wilderness. Perhaps they hide out close to the enclave, and secretly hitch a lift with the mechanic, as he leaves for the pub. Or perhaps they manage to steal a small hologram generator that they reprogram to make them invisible.

This brings us to our first major point. Once we leave the clone enclave, we are in the future (see also: Demolition Man, The Matrix, Back to the Future II, Minority Report), so cool future-tech is perfectly allowable as far as the audience is concerned. A large part of this film is a chase scene in a futuristic world, and we do see a little cool futuristic stuff: the trains, the jet bikes, and… well, that’s about it. In one sense, the audience is in the same shoes as the heroes: they have no real idea what this world is like. Our (and their) expectations and experience haven’t prepared us (and them) for the reality of the future world. The film should play on this more. Our characters arrive in the city: they should have a chance to be utterly amazed. They had expected the world to be a wasteland, but its teeming with people, none of whom appear to have heard of proximity alerts. Let’s see some future fashions that are actually different from contemporary fashion. We can steal future-tech from about a billion SF stories.

One disappointing aspect of the film was how little the world had progressed: they were able to build adult bodies from scratch, but almost every other bit of technology is what we’re capable of now. I suspect the decision to keep things largely contemporary was in order to concentrate on the naivety of the clones (ie. Learning About Sex) but I think the filmmakers missed an opportunity to put the audience in their shoes. We could have someone come up to Scarlett’s character and ask for an autograph – which we then reveal is done by writing with a stylus directly onto the person’s skin, causing an instant tattoo (and we could reveal that the fan “clears space” on their arm for the new signature – the tattoos can be instantly erased or moved). And we could have bits of “magic” that the clones see inside the enclave, being used for far more mundane purposes in the outside world – for example, the enclave might have a radiation-safe viewing deck showing the desolate outside world, which turns out to be a hologram backdrop from a popular future video game.

These are mostly changes that could easily occur in the background, and would be unlikely to offend the studios (as far as I know, which is not very far: I’ve never even been involved in the making of a full-length film), while providing a bit of cohesion between the enclave and the outside world: as it stands, the outside world section is a place for the characters to run through. It could serve other purposes at the same time. However, these changes would certainly not be enough to make this a profitable film. I’m afraid the film needs a little more controversy for that, and “involuntary organ donors” just isn’t going to do it. If the technology is there for building adult bodies, it’s not so much of a leap to go further and have brain transplants. Why bother repairing the old host body, when you can just move your brain into a new body? Ickier, more memorable, and we have a chance at some interesting plot points to go with it. The clones have to be physically trained to match (or exceed) the capabilities of the originals, which is a better explanation of why they have to be conscious, and the originals could even “train” the clones – interact with them – in a virtual reality environment, and it could be explained away to the originals as long as the clones weren’t allowed to talk (and add intrigue and a cool “game” in the enclave).

And while we’re at it, there are plenty of fun and cool things we could be doing in the enclave. Surely the president wouldn’t have just one clone. He’d have three or four. We’d see quite a few twins and triplets, especially of middle-aged men. Perhaps they are kept isolated from one another – we have sections that just don’t interact. Our hero explores and accidentally ends up in one of the other sections, without realising it. It’s identically set up, and has quite a few people in common – including himself. Perhaps his twin has also been exploring, and they swap locations a couple of times. His twin disappears, and there are rumours he made a run for it and died in the wasteland, but then returns, minus his memory (in fact, it’s an entirely new body with no memories – the owner has done a brain transplant). Admittedly, anything too complicated will violate our low-risk charter. We can’t smarten up the film much, but we can certainly do so a little.

Even barring the usual silly clone SF tropes (They’re secretly evil! They have no souls!) it’s a bit of a pity they don’t do much with the topics that cloning brings up – in particular, nature vs. nurture. Here, the clones are innocents while the originals are a wee bit selfish and, well, evil. The enclave raises its children to be passive and nice, but nature comes through – we already see a little of that with the frankly ridiculous clone memories our hero has of designing boats (which I’m trying to make plausible by having him interact with the original, albeit unknowingly in the Virtual Reality). I kept expecting that the outside-world version of the main character would be an explorer, someone else who is restless and curious, and that we would get a better sense of the similarities between them once they met.

Oh dear. I’m pretty sure this experiment is a failure. These changes might make the film slightly better, and marginally more profitable (I maintain that audiences really do prefer SF films that make sense and build a compelling world) but I don’t think they solve the fundamentally ordinary nature of the film. This is essentially a remake of a 1970’s SF film, with a little Philip K Dick thrown in. It’s an “Ideas” SF film without very compelling ideas, because the studio clearly doesn’t really want the ideas to be too challenging for fear they’d scare away the audience. We really have to put back Ideas into the film for it to work. Terminator 3 is another big long chase movie that I think works better because the ideas are somewhat more challenging; the conclusion is more daring. Working within the system, the best I can suggest is to add more invention to the chase sequences (as with the fall off the building). People have enjoyed good chase sequences since the beginning of cinema. Perhaps the makers of this film could have spent a bit more time watching Buster Keaton.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 27th, 2005 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Action, Forensic Analysis, I, Science Fiction, shellshear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.