With The Island flopping in the US, the critics have got their revenge on director Michael Bay. It's just a shame that, for once, he's made a half-decent blockbuster
With The Island flopping in the US, the critics have got their revenge on director Michael Bay. It's just a shame that, for once, he's made a half-decent blockbuster
"I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark when he made Pearl Harbor," sang the foulmouthed marionettes in last year's puppet spoof Team America World Police. Yet despite being voted one of the worst movies of 2001, Bay's wartime folly went on to gross around $450 million in theatres, before becoming a resounding worldwide hit on video and DVD.
An advertising graduate with a cut-per-second pop promo sensibility, Bay has long had the last laugh over critics whose badmouthing of his films like Bad Boys and The Rock has had no effect whatsoever on their rip-roaring box office performance. Yet after five straight US number ones in a row, Bay has finally come a cropper with The Island, whose "tsunami of negative reviews" has been matched by uncharacteristically piss-poor audience support in the US. "If you find yourself at The Island," declared one characteristically vitriolic write up in the 'Washington Post', "I have only three words of advice - Vote Yourself Off." It's advice which audiences have been following in droves, with US ticket receipts stalling at around the 30 million mark compared to the hundred and thirty million DreamWorks and Warners spent making the damn movie.
"It's always the director's fault," Bay has manfully told the press. "And it hurts. But I was five for five. And everyone from Spielberg to Zemeckis to Kubrick - they've all had big flops." Presumably, Stanley is now spinning in his grave at the thought of his name being invoked in defence of the bad fortunes of the director of Armageddon.
Yet the irony of this long-overdue public humiliation is that The Island is by no means Michael Bay's worst film. On the contrary, it's a perfectly functional multi-million dollar remake of a tacky 1970s sci-fi thriller which was long overdue for the Hollywood makeover treatment. Having already produced revamps of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Amityville Horror to money-spinning effect, Bay could be forgiven for thinking that the time was right for a new take on The Clonus Horror, a cronky old sci-fi thriller which was made for around $350,000. The only problem is that neither Bay, nor screenwriter Caspian Tredwell-Owen (on whose "original" story The Island is based) seems to have heard of The Clonus Horror.
Next page • "Fiveson is planning legal action against the makers of The Island for cloning his movie"
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