The Island

I nearly swooned when I saw the trailer for this movie: what could be better than casting the charming boy-man Ewan McGregor and the voluptuous girl-woman Scarlett Johanson in a movie about killing off everyone over 40?  Imagine my consternation, then, when the film unspooled and I realized this was not a re-make of "Logan's Run"!  They had the jumpsuits, the vaguely futuristic sets, even the obligatory scene of the beautiful couple emerging into the barren wasteland!  Yet this was not a new version of the movie we've been playing 24/7 at our state-of-the-art Hellaplex Theater for the last 25 years.  (We promise air conditioning, but the truth is you can make popcorn right in your seat.)

No, this was not a parable about euthanasia -- I mean, who cares about assisted suicide anymore, when we've got terrorists to take us out on the subway? -- but rather a meditation on the morality of cloning people for spare parts.  Now personally, if I need an extra hand, I just grow one, but I understand this is a lot of trouble for some people, so it's a social issue worth tackling.  The only problem is, only deeply religious people and left-wing nutjobs care about social issues anymore, and frankly they don't buy a lot of movie tickets.  So why did Michael Bay choose this particular subject as an excuse to blow lots of things up?

Knowing the mind of a powerful movie director is every bit as hard as knowing the mind of God, but when you've been playing Texas Hold'em with the Almighty as long as I have, you develop an intuition about these things, so let me make a guess about what Mikey's got in his head:  spiritual issues.  Yes, I know.  You may have missed the religious subtext in "Bad Boys" I & II, and the Biblical parallels cleverly hidden in "The RocK" and "Armageddon".  And that's because there weren't any.  But like the rest of us, La Bay is getting older -- he turns 40 this year (turn on the Carousel, Logan!) -- and it's time to start piling up chips for that big poker game in the sky.

What tipped me off?  It was the single mention of the word "soul" in the movie.  Now a good rule of fiction is that if you want the audience to disagree with something, have the villain say it.  In this case it was Sean Bean, vigorously defending his decision to set up a vast slaughterhouse for human Xeroxes.  And his defense?  They have no souls.  No other mention of religion anywhere in the movie, no deeply religious clones watching preacher-clones on flat-screens, not even a Scientology clone giving IQ tests!  Yet up pops the word on which the morality of the whole affair is supposed to hinge:  souls.

Now this is a subject I know something about, so I felt I should chime in to settle the debate, and it's no wonder that people get confused.  For future reference, clones do have souls.  So do gerbils and macaque monkeys, but not ferrets -- I thought they did, but I tried to do a deal with one and it bit me on the tail.  The point is, where there is life, there is choice, and where there is choice, there is Me.  And my choice is...the 4:30 showing of "Logan's Run".   I'll save your seat.