Movie: The Island

The Island
By Michael Bay
With Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson

The movie 2019. Times have changed. Rich people can get exact copies of themselves, clones or agnates as they are called in the movie, which serve as their insurance policies. All of this with the goal to be able to live longer. Does your liver need to be replaced? No problem. The agnate is ‘killed’ and there is your liver. You don’t want to carry your own child? No worries. The agnate will do it for you.
The company which was able to create these agnates promised the agnates wouldn’t have certain emotions (like curiosity, sexuality), so that no problems will occur. Of course this goes wrong.
The agnate community is a utopian facility, somewhere in a desert, deeply under the ground. They are told that they are the only survivors of ‘The Contamination’. Every night somebody wins the daily lottery. The price is a one way ticket to a paradise island which hasn’t been contaminated, where they can be free. At some point one of the agnates (Lincoln) does starts to get curious. He asks questions, but doesn’t get answers. Why do they still find survivors after all this time? Why can he never have bacon for breakfast? He gets suspicious.
When he accidentally finds out ‘The Island’ is actually the death of the agnate, he escapes together with another agnate (Jordan). They go out to find their ‘sponsors’; the people with the insurance policy, to tell them what is going on, and that the agnates do have feelings and emotions and they want to live as well as the normal human beings.
An exciting chase follows; will they reach their goal?

The movie raises a lot of ethical questions concerning cloning. It shows how the whole cloning concept could evolve into something terrible. It makes you think about how selfish people can be and how dangerous it is to experiment with these relatively new technologies of which we know so little.
In the movie there are some very interesting advanced technologies which might not be far away to actually be developed, are already in development or are just recently developed:

• Information displays on the street
• These displays are activated by speech and allow a user to find information about the city and its habitants. Like the golden pages but then digitalized and interactive.
• Videophones
• Memory implants in the brains when creating the agnate
• Virtual fighting in front of a large screen, while a holographic display shows the actual fight (Nintento Wii, but more advanced)
• A urinal checks the composition of the urine and based on that gives you advice on what to eat
• A real (ubiquitous) desktop interface
• Browsers are directly driven by hands: drawing, writing and moving the browsers around etc.
• Trains driven by electro magnetic fields
• Sleep is registered; dreams and REM sleep are recorded.

My opinion about the movie The movie quite surprised me. I expected it to be way over the top and completely surreal, and at some points of course it was (flying trams through the air), but it also showed some serious developments and I think it opens some ethic discussions about for example the development of the cloning technologies.
What I really noticed was the obvious attendance of advertising in the movie. Puma, X-Box and MSN played a really big role in the scenario:
- When Jordan and Lincoln are virtually fighting, the X-Box logo is shown almost during the whole scene.
- When Jordan and Lincoln use the information display on the street in L.A., the MSN logo is put on the screen for a few seconds
- At the beginning of the movie, Lincoln can’t find his left shoe. Puma shoes are shown all over the screen.

More about the movie:
The Island