Film Analysis: The Island

The movie The Island, directed by Michael Bay in 2005, is a SCI-FI genre film about clones. This movie features two main characters – Lincoln Six Echo (played by Ewan McGregor) and Jordan Two Delta (played by Scarlett Johansson) who escaped from a research institute after learning their true fate of being human clones. Lincoln Six Echo soon discovers the sinister purpose going on at that institute, rather than being kept safe from a contaminated world, and escapes with his friend Jordan Two Delta. The clone’s whole life revolved around winning the lottery, with the prize as moving to an uncontaminated paradisiacal island outside the institute that protect the dwellers against the contaminated environment, The movie created meaning by using the SCI-FI genre, full of futuristic technology and advancements of human life.

The SCI-FI genre occupies a vital role in the movie. It had created ideas, hopes and fears about the relationship the world has to technology, progress, and even to the human body. The movie allows us to think through these

issues in a unique way, because only SCI-FI is able to fully explore the space of opposites in a detailed and compelling way; for example: the clones are grown as source of genetically identical organs for transplantation and even babies are carried out by a surrogate clone mother who is a clone of the customer. The customers who are as shown are called “sponsors”. The sponsors are told that the clones live in a vegetative state without any consciousness and that they are not human at all. The clones, with full human development, are referred to as products, unequal to humans.
Generally, SCI-FI is represented in an ambivalent way in movies, which almost always is in the form of technology. In The Island, the cloning technology enables the sponsors to prolong their lives and to get biological babies without carrying them out by themselves. In the movie, for example, there is a woman who has given birth, and soon after the nurses take the child away, give it to the sponsors, and then proceed to kill the surrogate clone. This has shown that it doesn’t matter how humans do whatever it takes to suit their needs, but to do it as soon as possible. Unfortunately, this also means that the hope for a life of “inhuman” length (living longer than we should) is only a matter of money.
In this movie, the cloning of humans has been successful, moreover, it has become a commercial success. This results as the clones being nothing more than a product used for the purpose of prolonging somebody else’s life. For example, in the movie, Lincoln’s sponsor turns him in for his sake of living longer rather than Lincoln having a life. This cloning has created a significant amount of greed in the world of rich elites in The Island. These rich elites didn’t know that the clones were well alive and sentient but once they do, they’re unapologetic to their actions of wanting unnatural time.
The unnatural creations from the SCI-FI based genre also has created a dark aura to the overly bright institute and the world above it. Something that isn’t a part of the ‘circle of life’ has now been introduced using advanced technology, when it shouldn’t be happening. The act of cloning in The Island is illegal (also in real life) but the creator still wants to make the large amount of cash he gets for creating the clones and so, for example, the institute is well hidden underground. Realistically, it isn’t a sanitary, sterile, carefully controlled institute, but rather a dark, dirty, and detrimental secret kept from the world.
The way the SCI-FI genre is represented in this film points out the concerns about cloning, but shows us at the same time that this possible future is not too far away from today’s society.

Beginning as a dystopic science fiction movie about the cloning issue, this motion picture more and more turns into an action movie full of explosions during the course of action. This movie shows an ambivalent attitude towards new technologies using the SCI-FI genre. In everyday life, new technologies are used, but the high-end technology represented by cloning for spare parts is only affordable for the rich elite. The concept of cloning humans brings to light more than just a simple yes-we should, or no-we-should-not answer. To answer whether we should clone humans also brings to light science, technology, moral and ethical concerns, as well as religions notions. It is more of a question of: If we clone humans will we lose what makes us

human?