This is extreme thread necromancy (and there's be a little more of that till I cover the movies I like most and want to say something about), but better to bring them back from the dead than to create redundant threads or post off topic.
ourchair said:
Steve Buscemi is the shiznit, the bomb and the man all in one. I was so sad when they killed him. I'm like, great now we're stuck with only the stoic serious characters.
Fair enough, tastes differ. But it didn't occur to me that continuing to gaze at Scarlett Johansson (and Ewan McGregor) was a problem.
Nor did I think of our artificial Adam and Eve as "stoic". Rather they were childlike and charming - exactly as they should have been.
Shade said:
i'd also like to point out plot hole(s)- anyone else catch these?- first off, why'd the echo series go wrong? did they ever properly explain that?
There was no explanation for that. It was not what the movie was about. It was just part of the setup.
The only person who might have supplied an authoritative explanation for the recovering memories in the Echo, Foxtrot, Gamma and Helo lines was Doctor Henry Merrick - and he didn't know. There was no time for him to do more than identify the problem. So you can supply lots of possible explanations, but there is no way to say which is right.
The explanation that first occurred to me was that the scanning process picked up all sorts of things about the sponsor, not just genetics but gene expressions (as we saw), and then you had to edit stuff out, like diseases (such as the cirrhotic hepatitis that would have to be edited out of a copy of Tom Lincoln), and memories; and the later models may have been built on the assumption that since memories had never been a problem they weren't a problem, and screening out diseases more effectively or reducing costs or whatever was a higher priority.
ourchair said:
Yeah, maybe the no-prize explanation is that the alpha betas gammas and deltas, being earlier batches were less perfect in cloning and thus less likely to develop cloned memories, but the organs remained functional.
That works too.
ourchair said:
and how did lincoln six echo (i'm guessing on that number) get the memories stuck in his head? i mean, c'mon, i refuse to go along with cloning transplanting memories.
They weren't transplanted, merely copied, in that hour long scan. That was not just picking up a DNA sample.
ourchair said:
Exactly. Gattaca is awesome, and watching The Island for a deep meditation on social issues related to genetics is completely not the point.
I found
The Island (2005) to be a strong story with very sympathetic (and extremely well-acted) characters and startlingly authentic, complex deeply interwoven religious and social/political/philosophical issues. The religious theme dominated, tying the whole movie together. (Above all with the symbolic angel and the wing flapping sound effect in the cathedral scene.) It was really something special.
Of course it was already completely smashed at the American box office, and I knew this when I saw it.
Shade said:
does anyone buy that having the clones as veggies would kill the organs? t'would have been more effective if the organs were viable in the vegetable clones... but better as walking talking folk. wouldn't work without the spark of life, my foot.]
The reason you have to do that is because we live in a society that is going more and more Doctor Merrick's way.
You need to give the clones every chance to win over the sympathy of the audience, to get them to accept that they are human. Becase most people in real life, on the real life issues that
The Island (2005) implicitly took sides on, start on the oposite side. If someone they knew needed an organ, they wouldn't want to know where it came from, they'd just say "do it."
Just as McCord said, people want to eat the steak - and they don't want to see what happens inside that meat factory.
Grim history shows is that all it takes is a brand and a shackle
and lies and they stop seeing a human being and start seeing "property" or "a product".
All the rhetoric Doctor Merrick was spouting was taken from real life, and it
works. It's easy to convince people to accept a category of homo sapiens but not human, or human but "not a real person, like me" in McCord's words. It's terrifyingly easy to get people to buy that.
So you absolutely need the strong visual images - Lincoln Six Echo and Jordan Two Delta running for their lives - to set against the lies.
ourchair said:
But see "without the spark of life" is the screenwriter pretending he knows how to insert deep existential thinking into a summer blockbuster.
It was orthodox religious, not existential thinking, and obviously the box office condemned it. But it is there and it is very beautiful.
If I went by box office and not by what I saw and heard in the movie theatre, I would say
Armageddon -1998- was the goods and
The Island (2005) was nothing special. Instead, for me, it's the other way around.
