Michael Bay's Chicken Little Complex

I wrote this for the Karmaloop Blog which is supposed to be all hip and young:

Movies make us care about stuff, at least subconsciously. Didn't you have the urge to save some baby deer when Bambi's mom got shot? What about when Zach Braff in Garden State was all like, "Let me feel, Dad." Didn't you suddenly rise up just a centimeter against psychiatric drugs (not in a crazed Tom Cruise way)? At one point in life, didn't we all feel a little like Nemo with our ridiculed inadequacies?

So movies are powerful things, pretty much as powerful as books used to be. Without noticing it, they are gently nudging our brains towards forming opinions drawn from our cinematic experiences. This is why a war against Hollywood must be waged.

The epitome of Hollywood is the summer blockbuster, real popcorn-shoveling movies that pedal ideas with as much substance as Paris Hilton. But this summer's new explosion-happy blockbuster, The Island, is handled by our old friend Michael Bay, director of other classics like Bad Boys II and Pearl Harbor. In his semi-earnest attempt at an allegory in the tradition of such pieces as Brave New World and Gattaca, Bay presents to us a future where materialism (i.e. pathetic attempt at subtle product placement) and immorality runs rampant. In other words, a future where the sky is falling.

One reviewer, Kevin Carr, described Bay's film as "a beer commercial version of Logan’s Run for the lobotomized." Er, I couldn't disagree. Maybe if the lobes of your brain were not properly connected, you could appreciate the dazzling Calvin Klein-esque cinematography of each shot. Maybe if you were clinically insane, you could buy that the main characters survived falling off the side of a skyscraper. Maybe if you had seen Logan's Run, you would realize this is just a polished, Gen-X version of a smarter movie.

All that aside, what is Bay trying to pull? If anything, I'd think he were pushing his conservative agenda on viewers. (I have yet to discover his actual conservative background.) The message repeated with every unimaginative scene is: Cloning is bad. I have to admit he did not fail to display the humanity of "organ gardens" in his own elementary way, but he failed to provide any actual sound reason for his paranoia.

Cloning is a hot issue. Do I personally believe that Bay's future will be our own? No. Why? Because Bay made the situation too black and white. The world is not black and white. There is no way that we would ever reach that step where we would create exact copies of ourselves so we could kill them for immortality. Hell, immortality doesn't sound that great. Why would anyone want to live forever? Eventually, wouldn't it all get old?

Still, Bay's message has some relevancy to modern debate on the issue. The ethics behind cloning are completely unestablished. At what point does a clone stop being a copy, and become a sovereign human being? The question of religion will fall in. What right do we have to play God? Humanity has been considered sacred until now. And is this whole notion just paying homage to our arrogant belief that as superior beings in the animal kingdom, we have the right to all knowledge? Cloning must be pursued with caution and good sense. Undeniably, there is a creepy factor to it.

But as far as Bay's concerned, utopia is a Polyphonic Spree video where clones run rampant over the earth. This unrealistic solution, which is ridiculous as best, will make us think for when the time comes, what role, ultimately, will clonings play in our lives? And how will we define the ethics of the future when our ethics are so deeply rooted in a past that was completely unprepared for this.