The Island

The Island deals with similar issues to Never Let Me Go.  We see the world through the eyes of clones and are caused to empathize with their fate, while the humans are generally unethical and cruel. But while the clones in Never let me Go passively accept their fate, the clones in the Island are proactive.  They eventually succeed in liberating themselves and other clones from their physical confinement, their gruesome fate as ‘replacement parts’, and from the quasi heaven like delusion they know as ‘the island’.

Cinematography and mise-en-scène within The Island, depicts a dystopia that humans will not want to be a part of. The camera is shaky and distorts what’s happening within the scene to form a permanence of suspense. In fig 1. the surrogate mother is depicted as serene at the beginning of the scene and this is contrasted to her writhing sporadically on the bed at the end (fig 2).   

 The natural emotional distress felt by the audience is contrasted with the emotionless nurse, who’s neutral face is the bare minimum necessary to calm the dying clone.  This documents the superiority humans in this film believe they have over their “Inferior” clones.  The lighting is heavily saturated and is in no way naturalistic and this creates an ‘otherworldly’ effect. The mother is lying down and nurses are stood up which creates a power struggle between them and her but her struggles are futile. Through glass (once again!) Lincoln 6 Echo is mostly seen in a medium close up which is used “to capture his facial expressions” (Corrigan and White, 111).  These lurch from an initial elation to horror and disbelief. (fig 3) Once again, it is the clone that reflects our emotional response, and not the humans in the scene.

Film Editing is an important feature during the scene depicted in Fig 3. This scene takes place after the clone has died. To highlight the fact that humans are superior, the camera shows the dead clone and then switches to the nurse carrying the baby which “generates emotions and ideas through the construction of the two scenes” (Corrigan and White 161). She gives the baby to the clone’s human counterpart who is, by every means extremely happy. This non continuous editing helps to juxtapose the painful ending that the clone (or product) had to endure with the woman’s joy of her new child. This emphasises the fact that clones are treated like scrap metal and are forced to give away parts for the benefit of human kind, and are disposed of when there is no more use for them. We are not meant to like the humans in this world, who must be aware of the fates of their clones, but who are untroubled ethically.  The discontinuous editing also serves a further purpose.  As the nurse carries the new born baby to the human parents the editing seems to depict the sterile and emotionless world of the cloners as a bridge - between the selfish emotional world of the humans, and the genuine and innocent emotions of the clones themselves. When we see the look of disgust on Lincoln 6 Echo’ face the director leaves us no doubt as to which side of this bridge we’d prefer to be on.

 Works Cited

The Island, Dir Michael Bay, Dreamworks. 2005

Corrigan, Timothy and Patricia White.  The Film Experience: An introduction. ^4th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2015. Print.