The Island, after about a quarter of the way in to the movie you've already figured out the ending. A slow start for a Micheal Bay movie in terms of action. It all seems to kick off around the half way mark into the movie, with the usual fast cars, hot women and explosions that is expected from Bay.
Ewan McGregor is plays a semi decent role, gets pretty interesting when we see two of him at the same time. Though his character is supposedly educated to a level of that of a 15 year old, we see scenes of him being initially very innocent, though later we see scenes whereby he plays a hard ass. A rapid loss of innocence, in what seems to be under 48 hours? Also the language is a bit off, with characters never hearing the word 'dude' before in one scene, and then McGregor telling people to cut the crap in another, which seems a bit at odds, since he's been living in a utopian society, where everyone is told to be polite and nice to one another.
Scarlett Johansson plays a naive innocent character who pretty much all the way through the movie seemingly follows McGregors character around. However, in one scene we see Johansson kicking McGregors butt in a violent video game, but on the other hand she is in love with him. Seems a bit odd.
Steve Buscemi, Sean Bean, Djimon Housou all play their roles well, though predictably Sean Bean dies, as he seems to die in everything he is in bar Bravo Two Zero and few other roles. Buscemi plays a familiar role, though provides a bit of humour to the movie. Housou plays an ex GIGN agent, who goes round guns a blazing then suddenly finds a conscious. To be honest his character was a bit weak, though he played the role well. Michael Clarke Duncan makes an appearance for all of what seems like a minute, as a NFL player's surrogate, running around the compound with his chest open, and briefly in a billboard in the 'real' world.
One thing that put me off through out the movie was the product placement. The world seems to have gone kaputt yet still int he utopian society, there are Puma shoes, branded drinking water, XBOXs and all other kinds of branded crap, with long close ups on the products. We also see more Microsoft advertising for their now defunct MSN search service (now Bing) in the 'real' world. This kind of bored me through out, if your going to branded products in, put them subtlety. One product that did this was Apple, when McGregor pulls a disc out of a Apple cinema display and then blames Chinese manufacturing. Though I guess China no longer exists in the utopian society he lives in.
Over all probably worth watching if you have nothing better to do, and have just over an hour to kill, and enjoy watching Michael Bay movies.
Out of five starts in terms of if its worth watching I would give it a three and half, probably worth watching as a throw away movie.
