Matt Zoller Seitz, on "The Island," the latest from the devil himself, Michael Bay:
After Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and Bad Boys 2, it goes without saying that The Island is inferior not just to Blade Runner or Minority Report, but to almost any big budget sci-fi film of the last 30 years. (Spielberg deserves partial blame for this dystopian horse apple; he sent Bay the script and lured him away from regular producer Jerry Bruckheimer to direct it.) Bay is a serial abuser of CinemaScope, and this movie's images rank with his cruddiest. Some of the most kinetically important moments are sloppily composed, cluttered with welding sparks and strobe flashes, and filmed with such absurdly long lenses that they become an objective correlative for Bay's shallowness. The Island is the kind of nine-figure monstrosity that invites critics to take turns bashing it like a piñata. To quote Slant magazine's Keith Uhlich, "I think we're far enough along in our civilization that the following can be stated with absolute authority: all Michael Bay movies are evil."...Posted by Stephen Silver at July 28, 2005 10:46 AM"Bay's movies render emotional and intellectual participation unnecessary. They aren't cinema, but the opposite of cinema."