‘The Island’

I went to the cinema last night with a couple of friends and saw The Island. I'd rocked up not really knowing what The Island was about and I ended having a feast on it. If you enjoyed Gattaca, chances are you will also like The Island. Note - this blog contains a spoiler of the film.

Synopsis

Set in a futuristic 21st century Earth, Lincoln Six Echo and Jordan Two Delta are two survivors of some unmentioned catastrophe that had struck the entire planet. Every day, new survivors would be found outside and brought back into the containment facility where they would recuperate and live. Like all the other survivors, both Lincoln and Jordan longingly hope to be chosen by means of a daily lottery to eventually go and live on the Island, the last uncontaminated parcel of land left on Earth in order to repopulate it.

However, Lincoln begins to question the life that he lives and eventually discovers quite by accident that everything he’d ever known about his existence had been a lie. It is during this moment that Jordan's name also happens to come up in the lottery.

Upon realising that Jordan is about to be ‘harvested’ for her organs, Lincoln grabs the unbelieving Jordan and makes a daring escape from the facility with her, eventually convincing her that there is no ‘Island’.

Some thoughts on The Island

Sure, there were bits in the film that reminded me of the sting of loneliness, as many films often can do, such as when the typical leading male character finds his typical perfect love in the film’s leading female character. But that aside, apart from the ethical and moral issues raised on the matter of cloning, stem-cell research and eugenics, I also picked up on several allegories, symbolism or parallels to the Christian faith throughout the film. Or if you know me personally, perhaps you could say this is just me reading far too much into things yet again.

Either way, to borrow from Sy Roger’s terminology, it was a well of living water as I drank in what seemed to me to be allegories of the faith I’d embraced. Films affect different people differently and for me, I walked away from the cinema quietly encouraged in the midst of what has been several prolonged weeks of melancholia and discouragement.

“I wish that there was more.

More than just waiting to go to the Island.” - Lincoln.

Lincoln’s statement had a personal impact on me. For me, it is a reminder – at least personally – not to fall into the trap of seeing my life as merely being “just in transition” while I wait to go to Paradise (read ‘heaven’), and not to forget the ‘now’, the ‘present’ as I focus on the future. There have been times when I’ve pinned so many of my hopes on the future that I became so detached from the present. While the New Testament teaches that believers of Christ are not to be of this world, it also made it clear that we are still to be in the world. So often, however, followers of Christ can erroneously make the Christian faith out to be simply merely ‘a guaranteed ticket to heaven’ or ‘a life insurance policy’ with the assurance of life eternal with God and totally forget that the kingdom of God actually begins right here right now on earth and not in some faraway space. What we do in the present with our lives right now, with our emotions, our grief, our anger, our rage, our bitterness, our hopes, fears and even joy all have an impact on not only the present but inevitably also the future.

The Island for me isn't just about the ethical issues of cloning, stem-cell research or even eugenics. And although it doesn't attempt to deal with or resolve these questions, it certainly made me think a bit more about it. As a spiritual allegory, like Lincoln and Jordan, we all live under a system that lies to us. While the lies in our society – that being rich, powerful, successful, popular or beautiful is what matters; or that we will only be happy when this or that happens – may be different to the lies told in The Island, they too nevertheless fill us with the same false hopes of happiness and paradise. Winning the lottery for the survivors in the film was what each of them could only ever dream of, yet, in reality, it would also be the road that would lead to their death and destruction. And that can be true in many of the false hopes and lies that we may believe in our society today, be they about who we are or what we’re worth. And sometimes what may seem like a trip to paradise or, indeed, start off like a trip to paradise can turn into a hellish journey or, in some cases, without us even knowing, take us further away from paradise instead.

And so, as Lincoln and Jordan flee through the desert after managing to break out of the facility, they encounter a snake. Lincoln, having never seen a snake before, gets curiously close to the rattler - far too close in fact - and much to the concern and angst of my fellow cinemagoers. During this scene, my friend and I could not but think of Adam and Eve’s similar encounter with the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

Later on, Lincoln manages to find McCord at a pub, a human friend he befriended back at the containment facility before the escape, and McCord tells Lincoln the whole truth – that all the other clones and Lincoln were created simply to provide spare body parts to enable those wealthy enough to afford it to fulfill the “new American dream – to live forever”. Lincoln later finds out it'd cost his sponsor $5 million to have him cloned. The rich, it seems, can afford to cheat death simply by summoning Mammon. Contrast that to the offer of eternal life promised by Jesus Christ himself in the Gospels, something offered to every individual regardless of their status, economic or otherwise, in society.

One of the other most striking allegory of Christianity that I’d missed initially was the way how the facility’s guards attempted to capture the runaway clones. They would shoot miniature fish hooks or harpoons into the back of the escapees as they tried to run away and would then simply reel them back in as if they were fish on a hook. Realistically, in life, it’s impossible. I mean, how could one pull a struggling, fully-grown adult by a single mere fish hook embedded in the flesh on his back? While I merely accepted that as being a given, being part and parcel of mid-21st century high-tech weaponry that they now owned, it wasn’t until later on in the film when my friend turned and smiled about the large net that breaks the fall of Lincoln and Jordan falling from a skyscraper that the allegory clicked. What are two common ways of catching fish? Either with a net or a fishing hook. And what did Jesus himself say to the fishermen by the shores of the Sea of Galilee? (Mark 1:17) Bingo.

Meanwhile, as the scientists back at the containment facility go through and compare a previous brain scan done on Lincoln with the most recent one just before he escaped, they discover that Lincoln had somehow grown memories belonging to his sponsor that he shouldn’t have. He was after all a clone, not a real human and without a soul. It was impossible but yet it happened somehow, presumably through an infection of some sort from outside according to the scientist. This made me think of Romans 12:2 about the process of renewing of our minds, and about how Christianity teaches it is the Holy Spirit that imparts us with new knowledge about ourselves, and of God and of the spiritual world around us when we turn to Him, and that until we are ‘infected’ with this external source and dimension of life, we will never quite ‘see’ the world the way Lincoln ultimately came to see his own.

The final metaphor I picked up was also a reference to the start of the movie when Lincoln was dreaming about being on a slick-looking boat called ‘Renovatio’ sailing towards the Island. We find out in the film that ‘Renovatio’ is Latin for ‘renewal’ or ‘rebirth’ and I thought it couldn’t have been a more befitting name for the boat that ultimately carries the freed Lincoln and Jordan to ‘paradise’. Lincoln and Jordan were created merely as a just another product on the shelf, born as live tissue and bred for harvesting. Yet, by seeing through the deception, by discovering the truth and escaping from the containment facility, they were ultimately ‘reborn’ again as individuals in their own right to live. No prizes for guessing who was the person in the Bible that also proclaimed that we too must be spiritually reborn or ‘born again’ to live eternally (John 3:1-8).