If You Really Loved Me You'd Let Me Eat Your Brain

From the July 22, 2005 Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern's thoughts on Michael Bay's latest celluloid affront:

"The Island" comes on like an overproduced coma, and leaves you feeling comatose by the end.  In between are 127 minutes of intermittent chaos that feels like a lifetime.

I won't blow the movie's big surprise, even though you'd guess it soon enough if you actually went to see this sci-fi monument to studio idiocy.  Suffice it to say that the script's many sources include "Blade Runner," "Coma," "Logan's Run" and a rancid whiff of "Soylent Green"; that "The Island" is a poor advertisement for stem-cell research, and that the director was Michael Bay.  His specialty, in such action extravaganzas as "Armageddon," "The Rock" and "Pearl Harbor" has been thunderous, consequence-free effects, and he is up to his old trick – his only tricks.

That explains the $10-ish million opening weekend.  I'd hope this is the beginning of the end for Mr. Bay but as long as cars are plentiful and crashy and audiences stupid he'll keep making movies.