Monday, July 25, 2005

Review - The Island

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Ha! What a flop!

The Island made me angry. Not at first, I must admit. I thought the first half an hour was actually somewhat decent. Better than any other Bay-directed shite, anyway. Ewan was lookin' good, strutting around in his tight white jumpsuit. The effects were not bad. The set-up was decently paced and not edited into a siezure-inducing maelstrom of MTV-plucked nonsense. Always nice to see Steve Buscemi getting work.

Then Ewan discovers the "secret" of the island, which was clear to a three-year-old who caught the reflection of the preview through the prism of his sippy cup, and the movie turns into a dear-god-stab-me-in-the-throat-I-would-rather-choke-on-my-own-
bleeding-insides-than-watch-anymore-of-this atrocity.

First off, the "scary" scenes of Ewan discovering the clone-killing behind the scenes? Completely, unbelievably UNSCARY. We're shown the deaths of two characters they didn't make us care about at all, we knew them for about five seconds before they were offed. Secondly, the way the scenes were shot were just obvious and lacking in any tension. "Ooh, I'm a scary nurse who glares at you in an edited sequence of ten different glaring shots until I put some Drano in your IV." And this part pissed me off seperately because, in EW, Michael Bay went on about how he was gripped by the script when it killed a pregnant woman, and uh, HELLO, MICHAEL BAY, but you read and shot the entire movie and HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WAS GOING ON since the woman WAS NOT PREGNANT ANYMORE - she'd given birth to her baby already when you killed her. And then we get this scene of Michael Clarke Duncan running down a hallway and smashing gaurds like he's headed for the goalpost, though right before this we'd watched HIS CHEST CAVITY BE SAWED OPEN BY A ROBOTIC SAW but does this interfere with Michael Bay's chance to make some HAHAHA pulse-pounding football crunching scenes? Lord no. Michael Clarke Duncan should've jumped off that table and immediately slipped on his erupted insides, cue dead.

Anyway. Ewan runs back and grabs Scarlett who's just won what she's been bred to always want, her biggest dream come true, she's going to the island! She'll live the best life one can ever imagine. Paradise, heaven, eternal happiness. Ewan grabs her and says, "The island is fake! Come with me!" Then the guards appear and start shooting at the both of them. And Ewan's running ahead, not even holding on to her. And this girl who's biggest dream had just come true, what does she do? SHE FOLLOWS THE LUNATIC WITHOUT A SECOND THOUGHT. "Oh, okay, goodbye MY DREAM OF PERFECT HAPPY FOREVER, I'll jump down a sewage chute with the crazy man who obviously wants me to stay with him and not leave, sure I'll die for his crazy-talk which has not been proven to me at all." THANKS FOR THE CHARACTER WORK, MR. BAY.

Scarlett is nothing but PG-cleavage and unsmearable pink lip gloss here, completely wasted, she doesn't have a thing to work with. Ewan gets some supposed-to-be-fun scenes with his real-world counterpart that hit the comedy heights of biting each other laughs. Looka me, I'm biting myself! Whoop whoop!

GOD. What a piece of shit this movie was. The action scenes were boring, and made no sense. I know, you'd think I'd know what to expect going in to a Michael Fucking Bay movie, but they had me fooled. The reviews said "hey, this is better than his other movies, it has a brain!", and that's why I feel so betrayed, so much angrier at this movie than his other movies, it pretended it has a thought, it fooled relatively reasonable people, and it's no better than The Rock or Con Fucking Air (not Bay's but might as well have been).

He took two actors that I really usually like and made me want to smash their faces in. Fuck you, Michael Bay! I laugh and laugh that this movie is an enormous flop. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, I say. I hope you slip off the trail of cocaine on your hooker's ass and smash your head into your pleather sofa corner, you talentless piece of shit hack. I will never be fooled again!
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