Supersonic Strap-On

THE ISLAND

Directed by Michael Bay

Like every auteur, Michael Bay has a signature: an eardrum-rattling BOOM that coincides with a smash-cut to characters driving really fast or bashing each other's brains in or running through a dimly lit corridor while someone shouts, "Go! Go! Go!" The BOOM is Bay's dimwit version of Spike Lee's people-mover shot-a dubious filmmaking "innovation," seemingly devised to allow non-film-geeks to identify Bay's work from the other side of the tv showroom at Circuit City. It's a bully's transition, the directorial equivalent of smacking someone in the face to make sure he's paying attention. Sadly, Bay's unbroken string of hits-even Pearl Harbor grossed $450 million worldwide-suggests that viewers, when slapped, will take it and like it.

Bay's latest, The Island, is another BOOM fest, a migraine-inducing sci-fi thriller about prisoners in a contaminated future who live in a hermetically sealed city and hope to win a lottery that will deliver them to an island paradise. Ewan McGregor is Lincoln Six Echo, a mild- mannered gent who dares ask why certain people get chosen for the lottery and why some of his coworkers supervise a creepy network of feeding tubes and why he found a butterfly in an area that's exposed to the allegedly contaminated air outside. Scarlett Johannson is Jordan Two Delta, a babe who fills out a jumpsuit even better than Lois Chiles in Moonraker. Together they rebel against The System (personified by Sean Bean's psychatrist-controller, Merrick) by deducing that the city's Purgatory/Heaven mythology is a scam, then plotting their escape.

The conspiratorial tropes and the Logan's Run-meets-Tony Scott production design situate The Island within a familiar sci-fi subgenre, the anti-authoritarian fantasy, and confirm the plot will offer few surprises. But a real filmmaker can weave even tired elements into a ribbon of dreams that snakes through the viewer's imagination and connects with life. Think of Blade Runner, which is basically Raymond Chandler's Metropolis with five (possibly six) Marias, or Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, which on paper sounds like just another futuristic thriller warning, "Be careful what you wish for." Through meaningful compositions, primordial symbolism and prescient production design, Blade Runner became a melancholy contemplation of death, globalization and the possibility of mechanized souls, while Minority Report explored the consequences of letting government play daddy, the different meanings of the word "visionary" and the kinship between conspiracies, dreams, voyeurism and moviemaking. (When cop John Anderton stands before his hologram screen and sifts through police data and Pre-Cog imagery, he's equal parts detective and film editor.)

After Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and Bad Boys 2, it goes without saying that The Island is inferior not just to Blade Runner or Minority Report, but to almost any big budget sci-fi film of the last 30 years. (Spielberg deserves partial blame for this dystopian horse apple; he sent Bay the script and lured him away from regular producer Jerry Bruckheimer to direct it.) Bay is a serial abuser of CinemaScope, and this movie's images rank with his cruddiest. Some of the most kinetically important moments are sloppily composed, cluttered with welding sparks and strobe flashes, and filmed with such absurdly long lenses that they become an objective correlative for Bay's shallowness. The Island is the kind of nine-figure monstrosity that invites critics to take turns bashing it like a piñata. To quote Slant magazine's Keith Uhlich, "I think we're far enough along in our civilization that the following can be stated with absolute authority: all Michael Bay movies are evil."

But rather than keep swinging until the candy falls out, let's instead study the piñata's construction and try to discern why Bay's work is so insubstantial and yet so menacing. Shorn of every type of connective material (intellectual, geographical, moral, rhythmic), his films sprint from peak to peak (or as hack action writers might put it, from whammy to whammy), herald both big and small moments with hysterical fanfare, and treat plot points not as a springboard to introspection, parable or poetry, but as chronological signposts that mean exactly what the script says they mean and nothing more. Bay's movies render emotional and intellectual participation unnecessary. They aren't cinema, but the opposite of cinema.

Cinema doesn't feel and think so you don't have to. It invites you to think and feel for yourself-not by inundating the viewer with exposition and connect-the-dots psychoanalysis (qualities canonized in Batman Begins) but by presenting images and situations that are playful and exact, yet open to interpretation, or at least engagement. Cinema means more than it says or shows; it has a life beyond what's contained in each frame; its fundamental and deliberate incompleteness is an endless provocation to reflect, interpret and dream. Why, exactly, did Travis Bickle kill all those people? What, exactly, happened to Dave Bowman at the end of 2001? We don't know, exactly, and we'll never know. The films' images provoke questions and associations while discouraging reductive answers. That's why we can't stop thinking and talking and writing about these movies.

The Island doesn't invite reflection, or even in-the-moment free association. With its action-figure characterizations, frenzied glitz, galumphing score, Schwarzenegger kiss-off lines and incidental homophobia and sexism (I counted at least two effeminate-menacing characters, and poor Johannson is made to play a scene validating the idea that women can't be trusted with credit cards), it's actively hostile to thought itself.

Without spoiling the movie's faux surprises, let's just say that in better hands, the conspiracy, once revealed, would have inflamed modern fears that the body is becoming a malleable husk, that recent medical advances are just another way for the rich to exploit the poor, and that consumers won't trouble themselves with thoughts of exploitation, much less indict themselves for selfishness, if they're getting what they want at a decent price. But Bay treats the conspiracy as nothing more than an arbitrary succession of markers. As soon as The Island discloses its narrative particulars, it flushes them like spent condoms and fixates on tedious, viscerally abusive chases, fistfights and explosions, and product placement for Johnnie Rocket's, Ben and Jerry's, Puma, Aquafina, Cadillac, Calvin Klein, Apple, Michelob, Budweiser, Speedo, Nokia and, I kid you not, Amtrak. (Minority Report's product placement was obnoxious, too, but at least Spielberg fused it with the movie's privacy-invasion themes and made it funny.)

There's no mystery or poetry in The Island-no images as sweet and personal as the Wonka Bar monolith in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or as unnerving as the long shots of pastoral landscapes overrun by arterial ivy in War of the Worlds (an occupation literally nourished by blood) or as corny-haunting as the wordless scene in Revenge of the Sith-a downer 70s epic for nine-year-olds-where Anakin and Padme, separated by several kilometers of Coruscant real estate, seem to stare into each other's eyes (like that moment in Heat where De Niro senses Pacino watching him through infrared goggles). Bay can't summon that level of invention because his brain doesn't work conceptually. His moviemaking vocabulary is all action verbs and exclamation points. He's a medulla oblongata with an eyepiece.

Exhibit A is a long, witless chase involving a jet-propelled motorcycle. It plainly aims to one-up Spielberg's jet-pack scenes in Minority Report. But where Spielberg's set-pieces were witty (the flame-broiled burger) and translated surveillance-state power into fairy-tale visuals (the Pre-Crime cops scampered through the sky like the Wicked Witch's flying monkeys), Bay's jet cycle is just a supersonic strap-on. The sonic booms on the soundtrack aren't quite the Dolby Digital equivalent of horsemen's hoof beats, but they're chilling all the same-a Pavlovian illustration of Bay's belief that sensation equals feeling: the sound of cinema imploding.