We just returned from seeing The Island and I really enjoyed it. I think I’ve said that about every movie I’ve seen this summer, but they’ve all been good.
The movie takes place in 2019, so the fairly near future. While watching it I was thinking about how drastically different cinematic perceptions of the future are from film to film. Great examples are the recently watched Total Recall, in which people are apparently living on Mars right now. MInority Report, though I don’t know the date exactly, depicts the near future as a drastically different place in which everything is totally different. I, Robot was slightly less extreme except for, you know, the robots.
By those standards, The Island is rather less extreme. When another fourteen years have passed we will have definitely seen some drastic improvements, although people will still be using the Apple Cinema Displays, playing XBox, and using MSN Search. I guess it’s both oddly comforting and disconcerting to know that both of those companies are still around, duking it out well through the next decade.
The cars are always a challenge when shooting a film like this. People may not notice when you’re using current TV’s or computers, but they’ll notice when they see their car driving around. They did a fairly good job of weeding out cars to a select few that look at home in 2019 – for the most part (a Pontiac Vibe? Really?). It was nice to see the V8 Chryslers get plenty of screen time (even in the previews) because they’re always a pleasure to watch in action.
The entire movie, as I said before, was really, really fun, and by no means felt like two hours and 20 minutes. I’d suggest it to anyone into that sort of thing.