The Island

This film is brought to you by Puma, Calvin Klein, Nokia, Tag Heuer, Ben & Jerry’s, Xbox, and the V12 car. After years of famously ‘f*cking the frame’, this was the movie where Michael Bay finally got round to screwing the audience.

Really: it’s just one big advert. I remember years ago, Back to the Future 3 got loads of stick for all those Pepsi and Nike signs swooshing across the screen. More recently, Will Smith in I, Robot couldn’t get through three scenes without telling someone how cool his vintage Converse trainers where.

(You see, it was all about his ‘character’ being quirky for buying the footwear, and not at all about the ‘money’ Converse paid for the product placement.) Still, such tomfoolery is old school compared with The Island (2005).

Scene after scene is hand-crafted to show off the film’s sponsors. Here’s Steve Buscemi holding his Michelob beer unnaturally high. There’s Ewan MacGregor in a phone booth, half-obscured by a big MSN logo.

Hilariously, one scene simply opens on the hood of a Mack truck, stays there for a milli-second, then swings sideways to get on with the action. By the time a real, actual perfume advert starring Scarlet Johnannsen – which was all over the telly at the time – is judderingly ‘weaved’ into the storyline and shown in full glory on widescreen, you’re pretty much in through-the-looking-glass territory.

Still, among all the ads, they do gamely manage to squeeze in a plot. Thousands of people live in an underground complex-cum-prison, believing they’re the sole survivors from a global disease – but actually they’re just clones of rich people, kept alive in case the originals ever need a new body part. Surprisingly, given these people are essentially talking livestock with no concept of money or commerce, they’re clad from head to foot in designer Puma gear.

Soon Ewan and Scarlett escape to a very-much futuristic New York, where their survival strategy seems to revolve around looking worried in front of lots of advertising billboards featuring very-much contemporary brands.

Ewan McGregor, a past-master of poor career decisions, looks palpably distressed to be on screen among this nonsense. Look closely and you can almost see it in his eyes: ‘Christ, first Phantom Menace and now this..?’

It doesn’t help that he also has to play the ‘human’ version of himself as a rich, cocky Scottish git who’s into motorbikes. (Oh, the post-modern irony!) Hilariously, ‘real’ Ewan wears glasses – obviously, so the audience can tell them apart more easily. But hang on: he’s paid $5 million for a clone with twenty/twenty vision and he’s walking round in glasses?

Following stints in Troy and Silent Hill, Sean Bean once again proves that no imaginative world – no matter how mythical or dystopian – need necessarily preclude a thick Sheffield accent. It’s grim up t’future.

Set against all this bunkum, a mere helicopter explosion inevitably pales. In fact, had Bay formed a hundred real, full-sized helicopters in a giant aerial circle, then sent them all accelerating to the dead centre at top speed, the resulting fireball-to-end-all-fireballs could not be more spectacular than the shamefacedness with which he forces his brands down the gullet of the viewer. You feel like human foie gras by the end.



Artistic merit

I’m sorry, did you say ‘artistic merit’? Very perfunctory. The chopper pilot swings slowly round the side of a skyscraper just as a giant metal sign comes away from it, and says something like: ‘Oh-no-the-sign-is-coming-off-the-building-and-looks-like-it’s-going-to-hit-us’ instead of just moving out the way.

After the crash happens – the giant sign, our heroes and the exploding ‘copter all go hurtling to earth together – Bay starts humping the frame so vigorously that it’s anyone’s guess what’s going on. I rewound six times and all I could ascertain was that a crap CGI ball of chopper-shaped flame seemed to be falling.

Do the passengers survive?

Ewan and Scarlett do, natch. For some reason, there’s a giant trapeze net attached to the building about 20 feet up that our plucky couple land in and which the chopper somehow misses by a mile. Don’t question why: just be thankful the net wasn’t branded by Cola or something.

Positives

Weirdly, the product placement. After a while, you give up on any pretence that you’re actually watching a film and just start playing ‘spot the ads’. Much more fun.

Negatives

Djimon Hounsou’s ex-special forces hit squad prove repeatedly unable to hit a barn door at ten paces. Really, this elite team could spend all day at a fairground shoot-the-ducks gallery and not win a single goldfish.

Just before the chopper explosion, our heroes are stuck fast between the inside of a giant sign and a skyscraper. Stood forty feet above them, two mercs unleash such a barrage of relentless artillery from their machine guns that the iron-secured sign actually comes off the building. And yet they miss the two gawping moppets directly below them. Just rubbish.

Favourite quote

Steve Buscemi: “Just cos people want to eat the burger, doesn’t mean they want to meet the cow.”

Interesting fact

My mate was a storyboard artist on a Michael Bay film and said he was every bit as pleasant as you'd expect him to be.

Review by: Chopper

GoldenEye

Bond films seem to be highly fertile territory, not just for helicopter explosions but highly creative helicopter explosions.

Bullets and surface-to-air missiles are apparently far too mundane for Bond screenplay writers and GoldenEye doesn’t disappoint, with yet another unique combusting chopper. (Oo-er. If Roger Moore were writing this piece, that would be worthy of a cheap double-entendre.)

GoldenEye re-invigorated a franchise that had become stagnant during a six-year legal dispute over licensing rights. During this period, Timothy Dalton quit as Bond having been harshly deemed a failure – mainly due to the poor commercial performance of License To Kill.

Although his first Bond film, Goldeneye also represented the zenith of Pierce Brosnan’s stint as 007 – which soon descended into self-indulgent tripe, culminating in the risible Die Another Day. This movie managed to convey was a tense climate of post-Cold War espionage, with redundant or retired spies using their skills in other pursuits.

But enough cerebral chit-chat. GoldenEye is just a bloody cool film. The opening scene, with a sort of metallic Eastern Bloc soundtrack, was electrifying and quintessential Bond: bungee jumping off an enormous dam into a Russian chemical weapons base, before meeting up with 006 (Sean Bean as Alec Trevelyan) and wiring the place to explode.

During the mission, and throughout the film in fact, there is unintended light relief in the form of Sean Bean’s posh accent. Posh, that is, if you’re from East Yorkshire and Bean is from Harrogate. Just before his faux execution, Bean shouts at Bond: “Do it fer Englund, James. Blow ‘em all t’hell!” If he’d added: “Ecky thump” at the end, you could have sworn you were watching a lively episode of Last of the Summer Wine.

The high-point of the film though, is Robbie Coltrane’s scene-stealing turn as Valentin Zukovsky. It’s easy to imagine Coltrane licking his lips while reading the script for his part as an ex-KGB agent turned arms dealer and gangster.

His lines are delivered with a charisma and venom that make him utterly convincing as a ruthless Russian crime boss, still bitterly nursing a permanent limp after Bond shot him in the leg years ago.

His first scene with Bond has a fantastic exchange that’s worth repeating. After Bond asks for a favour, Zukovsky says: “You want ME to do YOU a favour?” (Ironic Brian Blessed style bellow, then a pause).  “My knee ACHES every day. Twice as bad when it is cold. Tell him how long the winter lasts in this country, Dmitri.”
[Weedy voice of Dmitri off screen[: “Well, it depends on…”
Zukovsky: “SILENCE!!!”

Coltrane, however, only narrowly pips some other inspired pieces of casting in the effort to refresh the Bond brand: Judi Dench brilliantly portraying M; Samantha Bond as a sassy, modern day Miss Moneypenny; and Famke Janssen as sadomasochist assassin, Xenia Onatopp.

Janssen’s Bond girl, in particular, was a brave move. The sadomasochistic elements, including tight leather outfits and crushing a man to death mid-coitus, are quite explicit for what people had come to expect of a Bond film. She even appears to orgasm while laying waste to some innocent civil servants with a machine gun.

As a youngish man at the time, I found her character a little confusing. Confusing in the sense that I was unsure whether it was okay to really fancy a murdering dominatrix and find her proclivities a bit of a turn on. It was a bit like when the seven-year old me saw a woman in a bra for the first time - in my mum’s Littlewoods catalogue. In both instances, I eventually decided it was more than okay.

Back to the film though, and its back-to-basics plot. Bond and Alec Trevelyan (Bean’s 006) infiltrate a Russian chemical weapons plant with the intention of blowing it up. It all goes wrong when 006 is captured and seemingly executed by a cruel-looking Russian general.

Bond escapes in magnificent style, motorcycling down a mountain runway and skydiving without parachute into a plummeting Cessna, which he eventually brings under control and flies away as the plant explodes. Several years later, a plot unfurls in which the same renegade general steals a secret Russian space weapon on behalf of a sinister but unseen criminal mastermind, Janus.

This, it turns out, is Yorkshire’s finest secret agent, Alec Trevelyan, who is revealed as the son of Lienz Cossacks. (Who knew the Soviets had colonised Pontefract?). Anyway, via a series of glamorous locations, Bond ends up in Cuba with the attractive but fairly dull Izabella Scorupco - although she’s perhaps unfortunate to appear as a computer programmer in a 007 film where the other main Bond girl is a leather-clad, murdering, sex maniac.

In the process of looking for Trevelyan’s base in the Cuban jungle, a chopper appears of out nowhere. A rope drops down, followed swiftly by randy vixen Onatopp, clearly in the mood for some more murder-sex.

As she squeezes the life out of Bond and screeches with desire, he manages to reattach her to the jump-rope and uses her gun to shoot at the hovering chopper. The panicking pilot loses control, and Onatopp is violently wrenched away only to become anchored to a tree.

She lets out a blood-curdling scream as the chopper vs. tree combination crushes her to death. She remains pinned to the tree, acting as a kind of human anchor for the ‘copter, which plummets to the ground and explodes in a massive fireball.

But we shouldn't forget another equally interesting helicopter explosion. Earlier in the film Bond and Natalya are captured and tied up inside a special stealth helicopter that's been booby-trapped.

Its missiles automatically fire and loop round to come straight back at the vehicle. Luckily, Bond manage to headbutt the ejector seat button and our heroes are shot out of the stationary whirlybird seconds before the missiles hit.

Artistic merit

Quite strong. Some thought clearly went into these fireballs. If it were a steak, it would be a nice, meaty sirloin. Not quite a filet mignon, but a luxury cut nonetheless.



Exploding helicopter innovation

Much like our blog on The Spy Who Loved Me’s underwater car-to-chopper rocket and Tomorrow Never Dies’ rusty washing line, I can’t recall another chopper being brought down by being attached to a human anchor. Well done, James.

Also we have never before seen anyone escape from a helicopter via ejector seats. As you can imagine the presence of 20-foot long, whirling metal blades makes ejecting from a helicopter a tad problematic. But in this chopper the blades are first ejected before Bond and Natalya are thrust into the sky inside a self-contained pod from which parachutes eventually emerge.

If none of that sounds terribly plausible, please try and remember this is a Bond film so why would it.

Number of exploding helicopters

Two.

Positives

The sheer originality and brutality of what brings the chopper down. No expense is spared on the black and orange fireball either.

Negatives

Frankly, the sad demise of the horny Onatopp. And the really bad pun from Brosnan afterwards: “She always did like a good squeeze”.

Interesting fact

Not that interesting and quite well known, but the film was named after Ian Fleming’s estate in Jamaica. The film was also the first in a three-film product placement tie-up with BMW, which saw Bond driving a sky blue Z-3, probably much like the one your mum’s hairdresser has. It was controversial at the time, and still is frankly.

Review by: Jindy

Still want more? Then check out the Exploding Helicopter podcast episode on GoldenEye. Listen to it on iTunes, Stitcher, Podomatic or YourListen.