The Island

This topic contains:

• overall comments and recommendations
• details about The Island's classification and consumer advice lines
• a review of The Island completed by Young Media Australia (YMA) on 29 July 2005.

Overall comments and recommendations

The Island is a science fiction, thriller movie set in the future that will appeal largely to a male adolescent audience. The first half of the film is thought-provoking science fiction; however, the second half is little more than an action chase film with no surprises, or suspense. Nonetheless, the intense action scenes and stunts manage to keep the second half alive.

About the movie

This section contains details about the movie, including its classification by the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) and the associated consumer advice lines.

YMA review

This review of the movie The Island contains the following information:

• a synopsis of the story
• use of violence
• material that may scare children
• sexual references
• nudity and sexual activity
• use of substances
• coarse language
• the movie's message

A synopsis of the story

The year is 2019 and as a result of global contamination, people live in a meticulously controlled sterile environment protected from the world outside. Every aspect of Tom Lincoln’s (Ewan McGregor) life is controlled and monitored. The one glimmer of hope for the people of Tom’s bubble-like world is the ‘Lottery’, the winners of which get transported to the Island; the world’s only remaining ‘pathogen-free zone”.

Central to Tom’s life are Sarah Jordan (Scarlett Johansson), who Tom spends his free time with and is developing strong feelings for, and his friend McCord (Steve Buscemi), a maintenance worker who lives a separate life to the general population and slips Tom contraband from time to time. After a time, Tom discovers the truth behind the Lottery, that it is a ruse to remove people from the general population so they can be killed and harvested for body parts. Tom is horrified by what he discovers as Sarah, who won the Lottery the previous night, is about to depart for the Island. Tom convinces Sarah of the truth behind the Lottery and the pair manages to elude security and escape to the real world outside.

Tom and Sarah find McCord, who informs them that they are clones engineered for body parts to extend the lives of rich people able to afford them. Tom decides that their only hope for survival is to track across America, confront the original the ‘real’ Tom Lincoln, referred to as the ‘sponsor’, and expose the illegal operation by going public. The remainder of the film is a hide and seek game between Tom and Sarah, and the film’s bad guys Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean), who runs the cloning operation and Albert Laurent (Dijmon Hounsou).

Use of violence

Research shows that children are at risk of learning that violence is an acceptable means of conflict resolution when violence is glamourised, performed by an attractive hero, successful, has few real life consequences, is set in a comic context and / or is mostly perpetrated by male characters with female victims, or by one race against another.

Repeated exposure to violent content can reinforce the message that violence is an acceptable means of conflict resolution. Repeated exposure also increases the risks that children will become desensitised to the use of violence in real life or develop an exaggerated view about the prevalence and likelihood of violence in their own world.

The Island contains frequent violent acts portraying brutal, callous, vicious and gruesome forms of violence:

• Tom and Sarah engage in simulated martial arts style fighting involving them kicking and punching each other’s bodies
• Tom kicks and punches guards
• Sarah smashes a guard across the face with a large pipe wrench with enough force to snap the guard’s head around and knock him off his feet
• Sarah uses a nail-gun to nail a guard’s hand to a door frame
• Albert Laurent shoots McCord in the chest at close range
• the cloned Tom punches the sponsor Tom in the face, grabs his head and smashes it into a car’s dashboard
• Laurent shoots the sponsor Tom in the chest
• Tom smashes Dr. Merrick’s head into steal pipes
• Tom shoots Merrick through the neck with a nail-like gun
• Tom strangles Merrick with a cord
• guards shoot a clone in the back of the legs with small grappling hooks that are connected via cords to guns
• the guards drag away the terrified clone screaming and kicking to have his organs harvested
• a female clone, after having a neonate harvested from her body, is injected with poison and left to die on the operating table while the new born baby is presented to the sponsor mother. There is a look of terror on the woman’s face as she is injected with the poison, her legs are in stirrups and being held down, while her body convulses.
• a guard tells Sarah how her body parts will be harvested, “They’re going to hack you up, take out your kidneys, lungs and heart”. This was said with the specific intent to terrorise Sarah.
• a number of clones are herded into a vault-like room, shut inside and subjected to blasts of heat (a type of extermination oven).
• Dr. Merrick stabs an unsuspecting clone in the neck with a large syringe and then injects poison into the clone’s neck.
• once the poison is injected, Merrick drops the body on the bed and walks out of the room leaving the body convulsing on the bed
• a semi-conscious clone is strapped to an operating table while his chest is cut open with an electric saw. Part way through the clone regains consciousness, jumps off of the operating table and runs out of the room with a number of guards in close pursuit. The guards shoot the man in the back of the legs with miniature grappling hooks that become embedded into the clone’s skin. The screaming clone is then dragged back into the operating room. A later scene shows the man’s liver being sealed in shrink-wrap
• in a torture chamber-like scene, hundreds of clones are strapped to tables with their eyes wired open while subliminal messages via flashing lights are imprinted on their brains
• numerous scenes showing war-like violence: men in black uniforms carrying machine guns, driving black cars, armoured vehicles and flying motorbikes with machineguns bolted on the back create mayhem by shooting regular police officers, the general public, destroying countless civilian vehicles and destroying a glass skyscraper
• Tom and Sarah drop train undercarriages off of the back of a truck causing the mass destruction of pursuing vehicles; cars are ripped in two and trashed like tin cans
• the band of mercenaries chasing Tom and Sarah are given the command “Use any force that is necessary to get the job done”

Material that may scare children

Under eight

Children under eight are most likely to be frightened by scary visual images, such as monsters, physical transformations, the death of a parent or child abandoned or separated from parents, children or animals being hurt or threatened and / or natural disasters.

The above-mentioned violent scenes are capable of terrifying or even traumatising younger children. Of these scenes two in particular could disturb younger children:

• clones with their eyes wired open being imprinted with subliminal messages
• the murder of the cloned woman who has just given birth.

• a fully formed adult clone is removed from his embryonic sack. A thick umbilical-like cord is cut, with copious amounts of blood flooding onto the floor; the sack is cut open with fluid and goo spilling onto the floor. A resuscitation mask is placed over the clone’s mouth while air is pumped into his lungs. The entire scene is Frankenstein-like, very messy and full of blood and gore.
• Tom and Sarah fall into a room full of clones in embryonic sacks with dozens of tubes and wires embedded into each sack
• images of newly formed embryos
• Tom is strapped to a dentist-like chair. Dr. Merrick then places several small mechanical spider-like creatures (for the purpose of scanning Tom’s brain) on Tom’s face. The creatures crawl into Tom’s eye and enter his brain.
• Tom has a nightmare in which he is pulled off a boat and under the water by surreal looking humanoid creatures, which have albino-like bodies covered in blue veins.

Aged eight to thirteen

Children aged eight to thirteen are most likely to be frightened by realistic threats and dangers, violence or threat of violence and / or stories in which children are hurt or threatened.

All of the images describe could seriously disturb children between the ages of eight and thirteen years.

Over the age of thirteen

Children over the age of thirteen are most likely to be frightened by realistic physical harm or threats, molestation or sexual assault and / or threats from aliens or the occult.

Younger adolescents in this age range are most likely to be effected by images of the more brutal and gruesome violence, gory graphic images of the clone births, images of mass clones being brain washed, and the graphic image of the woman being murdered who after giving birth.

Sexual references

The Island contains several sexual references:

• Tom is angry with McCord and seeks him out in a bar. He finds him sitting on the toilet in a toilet cubicle. Tom lifts him off the toilet seat and pins him against the toilet wall with McCord’s pants still around his ankles. A customer from the bar walks in on the pair just as McCord says, “Let me pull up my pants, and then take you back to my place so we can be alone”. The scene is inferring for the onlooker is that he has walked in on a homosexual act, and is played for comic relief.
• McCord is searching through his girlfriend’s wardrobe for clothes to give to Sarah. They find items of female clothing that are obviously designed for “sexual dress up” activities (waitress and nurses costumes).
• the cloned Tom confronts the sponsor Tom, and the sponsor Tom confesses that he has cerotic hepatitis as a result of having “lots and lots of sex”. When the cloned Tom indicates that he does not know what sex is, the sponsor Tom responds with “What! You’re kicking around with her (Sarah) and you’re a virgin. OK—I’m not going to spoil the surprise, boy you’re in for a treat”.

Nudity and sexual activity

The film contains a number of instances of partial nudity and sexual activity, including:

• naked male clones, although the images are too obscure to enable to the viewer a clear picture other than of their chests and legs
• Tom and Sarah kiss each other passionately on the mouth with Tom stating “That tongue thing is amazing”, and Sarah’s response “I know. Open your mouth”. Sarah lies on top of Tom, Tom’s naked torso is visible, and Sarah has her top off, but bra on. The pair kiss and have their arms wrapped around each other.
• There are a number of images of women wearing sensuous clothing, short skirts, low cut tops, and a bar scene with several women performing sensuous solo dancing
• McCord has numerous photos of scantily dressed women pinned to the wall of his room.

Use of substances

There are several scenes containing the consumption of alcohol:

• McCord and Tom both take a couple of swigs from a hip flask
• Tom and Sarah enter a bar, and while Tom goes off to find McCord, Sarah is left to fend for herself. When Tom returns with McCord, they find that Sarah has consumed several ‘shooters’ of alcohol and is somewhat tipsy. The inference from the scene is that the men supplying the shooters to Sarah are aware of her naivety and are trying to take advantage of it by getting her drunk.

Coarse language

The Island contains infrequent coarse language, including:

• arse
• shitty
• shit
• fucking
• freeking.

The movie's message

The movie presents a number of controversial moral issues around the cloning of humans, and using cloned body parts to save and extend human life. The film poses the belief that people will do what ever it takes to stay alive, including breaking the law and any moral codes, including committing murder and torture.

Parents may wish to discuss these issues with their older teenagers, plus the real world effects and consequences of the violence enacted throughout the film.