Afternoon Baseball

I had low expectations for this film, for this was a Michael Bay movie. He's responsible for the hemorrhaging disasters of Armageddon and Pearl Harbor. The latter was so bad that I saw a trailer a full year before the movie came out, with almost nothing given away, and I immediately thought, Wow, that's going to be absolutely terrible.
But I saw it, if for nothing else than Scarlett Johannson. Oh my God, wow. Nothing is more fickle than the top 3 or 5 list from a guy of who the most beautiful women are, but I can't see her dropping off the list for a couple decades (she's still only 20). If then.

But back to the film....The Island is not nearly as bad as the critics make it out to be. It's actually a fun blockbuster with a little bit of a brain.
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Most of the critics seemed to have been permanently scarred by Bay's other films, and immediately dismiss the movie once the action starts. Well, to be honest, it had less action than I expected (but very good action) and more halfway decent dialogue and character development than a lot of movies of this sort. Secondly, it's not painful to watch because of the casting. When you have great actors throughout (Ewan McGregor, Johannson, Steve Buscemi, Sean Bean, Michael Clarke Duncan, Ethan Phillips), they can lift up the most outlandish scenes and moments of terrible dialogue.

The strengths in this movie? Great action scenes, very very strong moments from the supporting characters waiting to go to this Island paradise, Steve Buscemi doing a nice job introducing the main characters to this Earth they thought didn't exist, and the nice foreshadowing throughout on how not to trust anyone -- and that humans just want to stay alive, and don't care how they have to do it.
Also, for such a wildly liberal group that Hollywood is, there's a pretty heavy-handed message about both the dangers of eugenics as well as how even the most careful programs can be terribly abused -- and people used as a means to an end.
It really was pretty damn good. And when there were slow moments or crap dialogue/plotting, you don't have time to realize the negatives because of the excitement level. That's something that for all its laughs, Wedding Crashers can't claim to have accomplished.