Individual Entry

The Island ***

USA: Michael Bay, 2005

Perhaps I've been a bit hard on Michael Bay. Armageddon and Pearl Harbor may be awful excuses for films, and my brother doesn't have a single kind word to say about Bad Boys 2, but everything else that I've seen from him has entertained me to some degree. The Rock is undoubtedly his best work, and Transformers, while far too long and filled with bad attempts at humour and tedious robot fights, is actually quite fun at times.

I've now seen the UK HD DVD release The Island, his solitary box office flop, and I have to say that I did like it, despite it being little more than a poorly disguised knock-off of Logan's Run (hardly the best film to use as your source material in the first place). Like all of his films, it demonstrates the aesthetic sensibilities and world view of a teenager, but I'm going to buck the trend and say that I don't think Bay is a completely incompetent filmmaker. True, he may overuse fast cutting and shakycam to an obnoxious degree, but he certainly knows how to shoot and stage a chase scene, which The Island has in abundance, and he seems to have a knack for getting nicely lit tight close-ups of the Beautiful People™ (and the not so beautiful). I can't defend it as a great work of art or even anything particularly thought-provoking (although I'm sure you could make a case for it being Michael Bay's anti-stem cell research film if you put your mind to it - hey, Bay is a Bush supporter, after all), but I had fun, which, when all said and done, about all you can really ask from a summer blockbuster.

IMDB reference