It’s safe to say that Bruckheimer and Simpson’s gamble had paid off when hiring Bay. Once Bad Boys took off, he hit the ground running with The Rock (Sean Connery, not Dwayne Johnson) and followed it up with major successes Armageddon and Pearl Harbor before the Bad Boys sequel in 2003. At this stage, Bruckheimer was working solo as Simpson had died of an overdose in 1996, but he remained vigilantly profitable by pivoting to new franchise Pirates Of The Caribbean. With 5 hits under Bay’s belt, he had set up his own production company (Bay films) and showed off what he had learnt, getting involved in horror remakes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Amityville Horror. However, it’s the first film Bay directs without Bruckheimer that leads to the biggest slip-up of his career so far.
Released in 2005, The Island is a Sci-Fi Action film featuring a star-studded cast. Lincoln (Ewan McGregor) wants more from life. Everyday is the same, dropping liquids into tubes for reasons unknown and he never wins the lottery – a once in a lifetime trip to The Island. Overseer Doctor Merrick (Sean Bean) tells him he should be happy, after all he survived the world ending and remains safe from the radiation outside. Yet each night, he dreams of motorbikes and sailing, a real future outside of the colony. After probing janitor and confidant McCord (Steve Buscemi) doesn’t come forth with the answers he was looking for, Lincoln’s dissatisfaction riles up the other residents who start to question their own existence. When his close friend Jordan (Scarlett Johansson) wins the ultimate prize, Lincoln investigates what’s going on behind the scenes and finds the horrifying truth.
What The Island succeeded with most was its ability to remind me of every other film in this genre.
Described as an updated version of Logan’s run, it felt to me like a less nuanced Blade Runner with more product placement. The production was sued for breach of copyright infringement from the creators of Parts: The Clonus Horror, so I was not the only one who saw such blatant ripping off. The amount of tropes Bay fits in is equivocal to Family Guy parody, with the comedy nearly as offensive. Directed to act as if they were children, half of the jokes are that Lincoln is unaware what normal household objects are and the other half is that Jordan is a woman. These misogynistic jibes seem straight from the director’s mouth, after a delay from Johansson prior to a sex scene was a “typical woman not coming out of the trailer” thing. For the action aspect, it’s exactly what you’d expect from Bay, with his main strength in sound editing mixed with relentless, tiresome explosions. An action film disguised as science fiction, it takes forty minutes to set up a plot predictable in five.
However, these critiques could be assigned to any of Bay’s previous films yet they were resounding triumphs financially. The Island had a budget of $126 million but returned only $162.9 million, a box office bomb by previous standards and pitiful in Bay’s own words. So why did The Island fail? Well, as film expert Niall Jenkins hypothesised, a title of The Island doesn’t inspire much interest. Generic doesn’t sell, and it had to compete with the other summer blockbusters such as Charlie and The Chocolate Factory and Wedding Crashers. Bay puts it down to the marketing campaign, attributed towards Dreamworks and Warner Brothers for advertising it as more of an “intellectual” route rather than an action movie. Out of 500 people Bay polled, 450 of them didn’t know the film had even been released. Coupled with a translucent story trying to repackage another paint-by-numbers action film, Michael Bay was no longer untouchable.