The Weekly Draw

Every week a lottery is drawn, and somebody wins the Island.

That is the best idea in The Island, and it arrives before anything explodes. Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) lives in a sealed, spotless compound with a crowd of other people in matching white. They have been told that the outside world is contaminated, that this building is the last safe place, and that one day, if they are lucky, their name will come up and they will be sent to a pathogen-free island. His friend Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson) badly wants to win.

The winners are not going to an island. They are being harvested. Every resident is a clone, grown for a wealthy "sponsor" outside, and the draw is how the compound picks who is used next, for an organ or for a pregnancy. Lincoln starts to suspect it. Then he runs, with Jordan, to a Los Angeles that has no idea what's been done in its name.

The film is set in 2019. That is seven years ago, and in the real 2019, nobody was grown in a vat.

The art: one good act, then a Bay

Give the film its due first. The first act, the compound and the draw, is good. The script credit is crowded. Caspian Tredwell-Owen wrote the story and original script, set about a century ahead, and Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci rewrote it, mostly to cut the cost. You can feel a far-future idea being squeezed into a present-day budget. The compound is the best-looking thing in the film: pale, humming, antiseptic, a place designed to make obedience feel like cleanliness. Sean Bean plays its scientist, Dr Merrick, as a salesman who has convinced himself he's a doctor. Steve Buscemi, as a technician who knows more than he should, brings the one jolt of human weirdness.

Then the doors open, and it becomes a Michael Bay film. This is not an insult, merely a description. It turns into a chase picture with a premise attached: a long chase through a Los Angeles that has no idea, a mercenary played by Djimon Hounsou, and a stretch of the film where two characters who have lived their whole lives indoors learn to run, fight and quip in the style of someone who has done it before. McGregor, who is also required to play his own sponsor, Tom Lincoln, is more fun as the sponsor, a yacht designer with a failing liver and no scruples. Johansson is given less to do. At 136 minutes, the film has a better 95-minute version buried inside it, and it keeps resurfacing to say so.

The best joke is accidental. The still we've chosen for this review shows the two clones standing in front of a shop window, staring at a giant advertisement for Calvin Klein and a television. You can read the brand on the glass. The film is about people sold as products, and it spends a good deal of its running time as a shop window itself. Reviewers at the time complained about the product placement, and it is hard to argue.

The film's business story is a small tragedy of its own. It cost about $126 million and took about $163 million worldwide, only $35.8 million of it in the United States, after opening fourth.

The prophecy: three bets, one miss

The clones. The film's central claim, adult human copies grown as insurance policies and kept in ignorance, is the part that hasn't happened and shows no sign of it. Reproductive human cloning is opposed by a UN declaration, and the real primate clones, born in 2018, were made from fetal cells; the ones from adult cells lived a few hours. The film's cleverest twist on its own premise is a piece of corporate logic. In the plot, the clones are officially said to be kept unconscious, but the trials found that the organs only survived if the clones were awake. The company needs the product to be a person. That is a good idea, and the film never really does anything with it, because by then the chase has begun.

The shortage. What did arrive is the thing behind the film, an organ shortage so severe that the rich would pay almost anything. A Kosovo clinic in 2008 is the cleanest proof. The Medicus clinic in Pristina carried out illegal kidney transplants, donors were recruited from poorer countries and promised up to $15,000, many said they never got it, and recipients reportedly paid up to $130,000. It came to light when a man collapsed at the airport. Doctors were convicted in 2013. Nobody locked these donors in a compound. The poverty did that.

The substitute. The industry's own answer to the shortage is stranger than the film's. In November 2025, NYU Langone performed the first transplant in a regulated trial of a gene-edited pig kidney, a kidney with ten edits, six human genes added and four pig genes removed. The earlier record is sobering: one recipient had her pig kidney removed in April 2025 after complications from an unrelated infection and went back on dialysis. But it's a trial, with a protocol, a monitoring committee and a lot of paperwork, which is about as far from Merrick's corridor as medicine gets. If The Island has a long-run ending, it is that the spare was never going to be a person. It was always going to be an animal.

The film also had a small, correct instinct about pregnancy, because the draw supplies surrogates as well as organs. Gestational surrogacy is not science fiction. In US data, carrier cycles rose from 727 in 1999 to 3,432 in 2013, and Italy made it a "universal crime" in 2024, with a vote of 84 to 58. Nobody involved is a clone, and the difference is the whole point. A person who agreed to the contract is a person with a lawyer.

The reading

The Island gets a 5.8 for the first act and the one line of reasoning about consciousness, and it loses points for everything it does with the freedom it grants itself afterwards. It was sued for resemblance to a 1979 low-budget film, Parts: The Clonus Horror. The case was settled.

As prophecy it is useful in a roundabout way. It didn't predict the clone. It predicted the draw: that a system built on taking from some people for others would work best if the people believed in a happy ending. Look at any waiting list and you'll find a milder form of it. The film gives hope the job of keeping people docile, and it's a thought worth a better film.

Lincoln is told he has won the Island. The Island is the pitch, and the pitch is the point. The film, once it escapes the building, can't think of a better one.