The Island (2005) on Netflix
PG-1320052h 16mActionAdventureRomance
Lincoln Six Echo and Jordan Two Delta live in a sealed compound, where a weekly lottery sends one resident to the last uncontaminated island. Lincoln has dreams that are not his own.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb6.8/10345,148 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes40%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 2019, Lincoln Six Echo and Jordan Two Delta live in an isolated compound governed by strict rules. Everyone there is told that the planet has become too contaminated for life, apart from a single island free of pathogens, and that a weekly lottery sends one resident away to live on it. Lincoln starts to dream of things he never lived through. Dr. Bernard Merrick, the scientist in charge of the compound, worries about him and has probes implanted in Lincoln to follow his brain activity.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Island (2005)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The creators of the 1979 film Parts: The Clonus Horror, also about a colony that breeds clones to harvest organs for the elite, filed a copyright infringement suit in 2005; a federal judge scheduled the case to go to trial in February 2007, but DreamWorks settled out of court in late 2006 for an undisclosed seven-figure sum.
- Director Michael Bay said the film worked really well overseas but that no one knew about it in America: he asked 500 people before it came out and they did not even know when it was coming out.
- In the original script by Caspian Tredwell-Owen, the story was set one hundred years in the future and Scarlett Johansson's character Jordan Two Delta was originally named Ester and was meant to be pregnant.
- Michael Marshall Smith's 1996 novel Spares, in which the hero liberates intelligent clones from a "spare farm", was optioned by DreamWorks in the late 1990s but never made; it remains unclear whether it inspired The Island, so Marshall Smith did not consider legal action worthwhile.
- Edward Jay Epstein of Slate blamed the box office failure on poor publicity, noting that research polls showed little awareness of The Island's impending release among its target audience and that trailers bore little relation to the film's plot.
- The Island was the first of many collaborations between Spielberg, Bay, Kurtzman and Orci, who went on to the live-action Transformers films, while Kurtzman and Orci also wrote Cowboys & Aliens and produced Eagle Eye alongside Spielberg.
