Science > Abortion > The Island: A Pro-Life, Anti-Cloning Movie From Hollywood
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Science > Abortion |
| User: |
"words of truth" |
| Date: |
24 Sep 2005 07:58:34 PM |
| Object: |
The Island: A Pro-Life, Anti-Cloning Movie From Hollywood |
http://am.novopress.info/index.php?p=839
Movie Review
The Island - A Pro-Life Perspective From Hollywood?
Nah. It Couldn't Be
By John Jalsevac for LifeSiteNews.com
(Warning: The following review contains plot spoilers. Also, it should
be noted that there are two distinct faces to The Island. One face is
that of an intellectual thriller that explores some of the most
pressing moral questions of the present day and demonstrates a
remarkable amount of respect for the dignity of human life; for this
reason I recommend the film. The other face is that of an action flick
with all of the genre-typical moral obfuscation-innocents being killed
in fiery car-chases, etc. The film also contains a brief, non-explicit
sex scene. The film is definitely not suitable for children and parents
are strongly cautioned to review the content of the film.)
Michael Bay is a director that makes explosions, and he happens to make
them very well. The director of such Hollywood blockbusters as Pearl
Harbor and Bad Boys is renowned for making things go BOOM!, a lot. The
newest project from Bay, the $120 million The Island, is no different
in this respect.
But the most curious and surprising thing about The Island is that not
only do a lot of things go boom, but it is a philosophically and
morally explosive piece of art. In an interview about The Island Sean
Bean (The Lord of the Rings), who plays the bad guy, mused: "I found
[The Island] quite disturbing...because it makes you think about
it...You really have to wonder if it's right."
By "it" Bean means human cloning and all the many contingent moral
dilemmas arising from its practice, which pertinent moral dilemmas the
film tackles with a lovely-to-behold moral deftness.
The movie was so very deeply disturbing; and that is the greatest
complement I can give it. Hollywood rarely creates truly disturbing
films; mostly they're just sick, and it's not at all the same
thing. The Island, however, made me want to stand up in the theatre and
scream long philosophical and theological diatribes at the screen.
That's disturbing.
Purposely set in the only-too-near future the movie focuses on two
characters played by Ewan McGregor (Lincoln Six-Echo) and Scarlett
Johansson (Jordan Two-Delta). For the first twenty minutes of the movie
it's all classic and predictable science-fiction, 1984/utopian stuff.
The 'outside' world has been contaminated (presumably through
nuclear warfare) and there remains one last bastion of humanity.
Lincoln Six-Echo and Jordan Two-Delta are two close friends who live in
a futuristic, climate controlled complex that shields the inhabitants
from 'the contamination'. The several thousand residents all live
regulated lives. Everybody wears the same white tracksuit, eats the
same food according to strict dietary restrictions, exercises regularly
and reports to 'wellness centers' whenever automated sleep and
urine detectors indicate that something in the body is off-kilter.
Besides performing various mundane jobs and entertaining themselves at
night with virtual sports and frequenting stylish futuristic bars, the
residents spend their time dreaming about being chosen by the daily
"lotteries" to go to The Island. The Island, the residents are
told, is the only uncontaminated place left on earth; it is a tropical
paradise, and to be chosen go to is the ultimate dream of every
resident. Once there the residents will begin the noble process of
repopulating the earth.
Of course all isn't as it seems. Lincoln Six-Echo (McGregor)
demonstrates an unusual level of curiosity which leads him at various
points to enter restricted areas of the complex under false pretences.
Eventually his curiosity leads him to explore further and he enters a
restricted area of the building that he has never seen before.
This is where the movie begins to disturb. Through a series of
discoveries Lincoln realizes that there is no island at all, but rather
winning the lottery means that your time has come to be harvested for
your organs and other body parts. Lincoln flees in horror with Jordan
Two-Delta, who had herself won the lottery not hours before, in tow;
they outwit the security and eventually escape the complex.
Once the pair leave the only world they've ever known, escaping to a
not particularly futuristic Californian outback town, they track down
one of the tech/mechanical staff from the complex, McCord, who Lincoln
had befriended earlier and who had sometimes smuggled contraband to
him. McCord begrudgingly explains that in fact the pair, and all the
inhabitants of the complex, are clones who have been created as several
million dollar 'insurance policies' for some of society's wealthy
elite. That is to say, if the person who ordered the 'insurance
policy' starts falling ill, they will glean their clone from the
general populace by arranging it so that their clone wins the lottery;
then they harvest the perfectly compatible organs or tissue they need
to continue to live.
One of the great scenes, great for its simplicity, occurs when McCord
tries to explain to the newly escaped clones that they're not real
people. "You're clones," he says to them. When they look
increasingly confused he tries to clarify, stammering: "You're not
like me...You're not real people. You're copies of real people."
But that doesn't quite seem to work either. So he finishes off with a
bang, "You don't have souls."
Of course it's all rubbish, and that's the point. The confusion of
Lincoln and Jordan, and the horror of their dawning understanding is
evidence enough of their humanity. As I thought about it later I could
almost picture a doctor performing 'in utero' surgery on a
twenty-one week old baby trying to gently explain that the only reason
he was doing it was because the baby was 'wanted', but that if he
wasn't wanted then he "wasn't a real person." That's
precisely the sort of bizarre image that this movie is designed to
invoke.
There are so many gut-wrenching parts of this film that it's
difficult to know what to talk about; in the theater I often found
myself clenching my fists as I heard the grossly illogical, emotionally
based 'arguments' and counter-'arguments' that are conjured
forth to justify the morally atrocious acts about which I daily write.
There are devastating scenes-reminiscent of the images we have recently
seen of the inside of the mother's womb produced by modern ultrasound
technology-that take place inside the gestating facility where the
viewer is shown thousands of variously-developed clones growing in
mechanical uteruses. In another heart-wrenching sequence the new-born
baby of a cloned mother is snatched from her mother's arms and then
placed into the arms of an ecstatic adoptive mother and father. The
true mother is then killed because she was nothing more than a
'carrier' and she has served her purpose. In yet another shot a
hulking, muscular man, who we later find out is the clone of a
professional football player, escapes from the operating room just as
they are beginning to harvest his heart. As he is brought to his knees
by security he bellows out from through his tears: "I want to live! I
want to live!" He doesn't live, however, because he is only a
'product' and not a person. Just as our current clones, we are
assured, are 'embryos', not persons.
And then there is the particularly painful Terri Schiavo reference,
where Bean's character, who heads the facility, informs potential
'buyers' that the facility keeps all of the clones in Permanent
Vegetative States. It's a lie of course, but that doesn't matter,
because it makes the customers feel good about what they're doing.
It's all about what language you use. Call them 'products', not
persons; point out that you're saving life, but forget to mention
that you're also destroying it.
The oft-repeated aphorism of the movie is "people will do anything to
survive." Anything, the insinuation is, including the murder of
another who has an equal right to live.
Philosophically the climactic scene is that which takes place between
Bean's character, Merrick, the intelligent, driven, passionate head
of the cloning facility, and his hired bounty hunter, played by Djimon
Hounsou (Gladiator). Over the length of the film, as he hunts down
Lincoln and Jordan, Hounsou's character comes to realize that the
clones are human. In this final intellectual show-down Hounsou shows
Merrick a scar on his hand, similar to the one that the clones are
imprinted with, explaining that after a war in his home country he was
branded and labelled "less than human."
"War is just a business," he says. Then he asks of Merrick, "When
did you make killing your business?"
But Merrick protests angrily that he doesn't kill, but rather that he
gives life. He rattles off a list of diseases he can cure by using his
clones. "I can cure child leukemia!" he finally yells at Hounsou.
"How many people can say that they can do that?"
Hounsou leans back in his chair with a sly smile. "Just you and God.
That's the answer you want isn't it?"
I'll close off with the following quote from director Michael Bay.
Speaking about his movie Bay said: "The analogy I can make is that
everybody eats meat, but we don't want to know what goes on in the
slaughter house. Our movie takes place in the slaughter house."
The only difference is that the 'product' of the slaughter house in
The Island is human beings. And the only difference between the
slaughter house of The Island, and the cloning labs and stem cell labs
and in vitro fertilization clinics of the present, is the size of the
clones. We kill life in order to cure it. We kill life in order to
create it.
"The film takes a very high and mighty attitude towards its morally
ambiguous subject," says one reviewer. "Anyone who even speculates
that a person has every right to create a clone and harvest it is
portrayed as a Nazi or a pervert."
But that's simply not true. Most, if not all, of the employees of the
cloning facility are show as regular human beings with regular human
lives and regular human sympathies. Merrick himself is presented as
truly believing the benevolent nature of what he's doing; the
creators of The Island go to great length to make us sympathize with
Merrick. But it just won't work; it just doesn't gel.
If the reviewer walked away with the idea that those who believe that
someone has the right to clone to kill to live looks like a Nazi or a
pervert, it's because he has enough of the remnants of a once intact
moral vision to know that this just isn't a morally ambiguous
subject. And that is the beauty of The Island. It doesn't moralize,
it tells, it shows, and as it shows it deftly destroys any moral
ambiguity that has been fabricated by the scientific community without
even trying all that hard.
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| User: "Paul Duca" |
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| Title: Re: The Island: A Pro-Life, Anti-Cloning Movie From Hollywood |
25 Sep 2005 07:24:57 AM |
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Which laid down and died at the box office...of course, a lot of
things did this summer. I guess nobody thought to rally the Bible troops
the way Mel did.
Paul
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| User: "Elf M. Sternberg" |
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| Title: Re: The Island: A Pro-Life, Anti-Cloning Movie From Hollywood |
25 Sep 2005 10:50:16 AM |
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"words of truth" <wordsoftruth21@lycos.com> writes:
I'll close off with the following quote from director Michael Bay.
Speaking about his movie Bay said: "The analogy I can make is that
everybody eats meat, but we don't want to know what goes on in the
slaughter house. Our movie takes place in the slaughter house."
Nah, I know what goes on in the slaughter house. I know why the
people who run them tally up their daily total by calling them "kills."
That's what it is.
The only difference is that the 'product' of the slaughter house in
The Island is human beings. And the only difference between the
slaughter house of The Island, and the cloning labs and stem cell labs
and in vitro fertilization clinics of the present, is the size of the
clones.
And the capacity for thought. That's quite an important
distinction. The moral reciprocity we owe other people exists only
because that what could happen to them could happen to us.
World Net Daily had a recent rant by Ben Shapiro about
pornography and the question of "victimless crimes." Ben's take:
Were we to truly recognize such a philosophy, we would have to
legalize prostitution, drugs and suicide -- as well as the murder of
homeless drifters with no family or friends. After all, if someone
kills a homeless drifter, how does that affect anyone else?
That Ben is a moral monster of the first stripe should not come
as a surprise to anyone who has ever read him before. My response was
simple: "It affects the homeless man, you dolt. And since you too could
someday be homeless, moral reciprocity makes it incumbent upon you to
not harm that man."
The state of moral reciprocity does not and cannot apply to
embryos: they are not moral agents. We can *never* be in the place of
an embryo, because we are thinking moral agents.
Elf
--
Elf M. Sternberg, Immanentizing the Eschaton since 1988
http://www.drizzle.com/~elf
"You know how some people treat their body like a temple?
I treat mine like issa amusement park!" - Kei
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| User: "Tukla Ratte" |
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| Title: Re: The Island: A Pro-Life, Anti-Cloning Movie From Hollywood |
26 Sep 2005 01:40:08 PM |
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Elf M. Sternberg wrote:
< snip >
World Net Daily
Oh, hell.
had a recent rant by Ben Shapiro about
pornography and the question of "victimless crimes." Ben's take:
Were we to truly recognize such a philosophy, we would have to
legalize prostitution, drugs and suicide --
Which would be terrible because, if they were legal, people might start
picking up prostitutes, using drugs, or committing suicide.
as well as the murder of
homeless drifters with no family or friends. After all, if someone
kills a homeless drifter, how does that affect anyone else?
That Ben is a moral monster of the first stripe should not come
as a surprise to anyone who has ever read him before. My response was
simple: "It affects the homeless man, you dolt.
Gotta love that bigotry. The only humans who "count" are the ones who own
homes and maintain acceptable social networks.
And since you too could
someday be homeless, moral reciprocity makes it incumbent upon you to
not harm that man."
The state of moral reciprocity does not and cannot apply to
embryos: they are not moral agents. We can *never* be in the place of
an embryo, because we are thinking moral agents.
--
Tukla, Squeaker of Chew Toys
Official Mascot of Alt.Atheism
"There are too many stupid people and nobody to eat them."
- Carlos Mencia
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| User: "George Peatty" |
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| Title: Re: The Island: A Pro-Life, Anti-Cloning Movie From Hollywood |
26 Sep 2005 01:26:15 PM |
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On 25 Sep 2005 08:50:16 -0700, "Elf M. Sternberg" <elf@drizzle.com> wrote:
The state of moral reciprocity does not and cannot apply to
embryos: they are not moral agents. We can *never* be in the place of
an embryo, because we are thinking moral agents.
By that logic, it cannot apply to babies, either. Or, the demented. And,
that opens a Pandora's box of unacceptable choices ..
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| User: "Elf M. Sternberg" |
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| Title: Re: The Island: A Pro-Life, Anti-Cloning Movie From Hollywood |
26 Sep 2005 02:16:01 PM |
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George Peatty <pttyg47-1230@copper.net> writes:
On 25 Sep 2005 08:50:16 -0700, "Elf M. Sternberg" <elf@drizzle.com> wrote:
The state of moral reciprocity does not and cannot apply to
embryos: they are not moral agents. We can *never* be in the place of
an embryo, because we are thinking moral agents.
By that logic, it cannot apply to babies, either. Or, the demented. And,
that opens a Pandora's box of unacceptable choices ..
I was not under the impression that "the demented" do not
think. And yes, we do make unpalatable choices about the demented: we
recognize that they have an essential humanity that is not present and
we do what we can to restore it. There is a line of thought that doing
so violates the free will of whatever *is* present, and the question of
whether or not to forcibly medicate the mad is an ongoing and
contentious debate.
As for babies, you're right, and no, I don't see how that
opens up "unacceptable choices." Unpalatable ones, perhaps, but
"unacceptable" is a hard word to use there.
Elf
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| User: "Derek Janssen" |
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| Title: Re: The Island: A Pro-Life, Anti-Cloning Movie From Hollywood |
26 Sep 2005 05:28:42 PM |
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....Ehh, still think they ripped off "Parts: the Clonus Horror".
Derek Janssen (which brings up the whole "Thou shalt not steal old MST3K
episodes" commandment)
djanss@charter.net
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| User: "David Johnston" |
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| Title: Re: The Island: A Pro-Life, Anti-Cloning Movie From Hollywood |
26 Sep 2005 02:13:29 PM |
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On Mon, 26 Sep 2005 13:26:15 -0500, George Peatty
<pttyg47-1230@copper.net> wrote:
On 25 Sep 2005 08:50:16 -0700, "Elf M. Sternberg" <elf@drizzle.com> wrote:
The state of moral reciprocity does not and cannot apply to
embryos: they are not moral agents. We can *never* be in the place of
an embryo, because we are thinking moral agents.
By that logic, it cannot apply to babies, either. Or, the demented.
The demented? Were you under the impression that demented people
don't think?
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| User: "George Peatty" |
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| Title: Re: The Island: A Pro-Life, Anti-Cloning Movie From Hollywood |
27 Sep 2005 05:56:28 PM |
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On Mon, 26 Sep 2005 19:13:29 GMT, (David Johnston) wrote:
The state of moral reciprocity does not and cannot apply to
embryos: they are not moral agents. We can *never* be in the place of
an embryo, because we are thinking moral agents.
By that logic, it cannot apply to babies, either. Or, the demented.
The demented? Were you under the impression that demented people
don't think?
No, I'm saying they are not .. and cannot be .. thinking moral agents. One
form of dementia is dementia praecox, defined as
# noun: any of several psychotic disorders characterized by distortions of
reality and disturbances of thought and language and withdrawal from social
contact
We might .. if we want to take this discussion afield .. try to set an
arbitrary break point, when such a condition would preclude someone from
making moral decisions. I have no wish to go there. Suffice to say there
*is* such a point.
Synonyms for dementia include brainsick, crazy, dementedly, dementedness,
distracted, disturbed, mad, sick, unbalanced, unhinged, more...(all from
onelook.com) If this is an accurate description of the condition, the
ability to make moral choices of any kind must by definition be suspect.
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| User: "Katt" |
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| Title: Re: The Island: A Pro-Life, Anti-Cloning Movie From Hollywood |
27 Sep 2005 10:05:50 PM |
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"George Peatty" <pttyg47-1230@copper.net> wrote in message
news:2vngj1hosjr9or5sn6rn7mee0nmsb0hd5n@
No, I'm saying they are not .. and cannot be .. thinking moral agents.
One
form of dementia is dementia praecox, defined as
# noun: any of several psychotic disorders characterized by distortions
of
reality and disturbances of thought and language and withdrawal from
social
contact
Why do you think it is admissible for you to resurrect the *utterly
obsolete* psychiatric term 'dementia praecox', coined as long ago as *1893*
(by Kraepelin [1856-1926]), and which was replaced a whopping *94 years ago*
by the term 'schizophrenia'? Are you just a pathetically under-informed
bungler who is ridiculously out of his depth? Or are you deliberately trying
to mislead and manipulate people...? Which is it, munchkin??
Katt.
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| User: "George Peatty" |
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| Title: Re: The Island: A Pro-Life, Anti-Cloning Movie From Hollywood |
28 Sep 2005 08:08:29 AM |
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In article <iMn_e.2418$O%.2224@newsfe1-gui.ntli.net>, Katt says...
[snip]
Why do you think it is admissible for you to resurrect the *utterly
obsolete* psychiatric term 'dementia praecox', coined as long ago as *1893*
(by Kraepelin [1856-1926]), and which was replaced a whopping *94 years ago*
by the term 'schizophrenia'? Are you just a pathetically under-informed
bungler who is ridiculously out of his depth? Or are you deliberately trying
to mislead and manipulate people...? Which is it, munchkin??
I speak in language I think my listeners will understand. Take the hint. So,
my terminology is not from DSM-IV. You are seeking to gainsay my point with a
strawman argument. Without directly addressing it, I might add.
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