So what is The Island? Well, first off, it's not really the most important thing in The Island despite being the name of the film. That isn't apparent as the story begins and we see that Tom Lincoln (Ewan McGregor) and Sarah Jordan (Scarlett Johansson) are living in a compound housing the only survivors of a cataclysmic event that has left Earth uninhabitable. There is still a small secluded place called The Island that's safe to live on. Lincoln and his fellow denizens have a chance to go there via a lottery process. Turns out, though, it's all a sham. Lincoln, Jordan and everybody else are all just clones made to ensure that rich people have an extra liver, lung or whatever else should the need arise.
Whenever clones are called up to The Island, they get harvested for organs rather than brought to some glorious paradise. Lincoln and Jordan decide to make a break for it and escape into the real world. There, they plan to confront the people they're clones of in the hopes that they can provide some help in exposing this conspiracy. The screenplay, penned by Caspian Treadwell-Owen and the duo Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci, is a mixture of ideas that come, go and never leave much of a lasting impact. Chief among these is a bizarre detail that Lincoln and Jordan are sheltered clones who about the intellegence of a fifteen-year-old.
When the duo first gets out into the real world, they get into predictable wacky antics about misunderstanding certain phrases (a bartender using the term "Straight up" leads Jordan to look up at the ceiling). Eventually, though, their lack of real-world experience and stunted intellect vanishes. The script got its five jokes out of this aspect of the characters and now it'll never be referenced again. Extended chase scenes also primarily exist seemingly just to fill up the runtime, they neither further the characters nor deliver all that much memorable spectacle. Lincoln and Jordan ride a giant R from the top of a skyscraper to the street below and it has zero impact on anything, they might as well have just hopped onto a curb considering how much it influenced their adventure.
The Island's tendency to just handle and then dispose of whatever scene/characters/spectacle is in front of it like a Kleenex also means that some of the most interesting characters of the entire movie vanish disappointingly quickly. Michael Clarke Duncan and Steve Buscemi play two of the most distinctly-rendered people in the entirety of The Island but they end up getting disposed of rather quickly. Instead, the spotlight remains on the lead characters played by like Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson. It's painful to watch two talented people get plopped into such thinly-written roles and it's even more uncomfortable to see them navigate some truly abysmal dialogue. Not even Ewan "Moulin Rouge" McGregor can make a man exclaiming "A flying bug!" work.
Michael Bay's recurring penchant for color grading at least has a little more purpose here in The Island. The interiors of the compound Lincoln and Jordan live in are coated with grey and silver whereas the outside world is blanketed in teal-and-orange. There's way too much of the latter coloring but at least The Island does show some consideration in terms of color-coding certain environments. Less pleasing on a visual level is the disorienting camerawork and editing used to execute the action sequences in The Island. These set pieces, which should be the main course of any summer blockbuster, end up inducing nausea rather than thrills. Though it's better than most other Michael Bay films, don't take that as a recommendation to seek out a trip to The Island.
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