An Island Unto Itself

The most important movie I have seen this year is the Island. It stars Obi-Wan Kenobi Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson. The movie was directed by Michael Bay, who made other great action flicks like Bad Boys, the Rock, Armageddon and Pearl Harbor (harbor sucked some…but it was still fun to watch at home).

It gets a B grade from me as a film. The storyline was good, the effects were exciting, but unfortunately the chase scenes and running around became too fanciful. Some of the crud just would never happen in real life, yet they try to sell it that way to an extent. I understand, its sci-fi and we need to suspend disbelief, but some things just go too far.

What makes this film so very important is the content of the story. It is about cloning people for the sake of spare body parts. The elitists that can afford it pay $5 million to have a clone of them created. That way, if they ever need a heart or lung, or want to have a baby and not go through the pain, they can just use their “policy”.

Well, the clones have to be kept somewhere, and Bay shoves them in a Logan’s Run asylum that has horrific ramifications for winning the lottery. Well, what does all this mean?

The one hard thing to do when arguing the cause of Pro-Life (both abortion and embryonic stem cell research) is to put a face on the cause. Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman became the faces, the humanity that drove the abolitionist cause. Dr. M. L. King and other African Americans in the 60s became the humanity that we saw when we enacted civil rights legislation.

How do we equate humanity to the faceless in the womb… the faceless frozen in a test tube? They have no voice, they cannot complain, therefore they do not deserve to be called members of humanity.

The Island provides them faces. Cloning is not the only concern here. If we can feel pity for and root on Lincoln 6 Echo, McGregor’s character, we can do the same for the actual children that die every day due to the convenience of abortion and privately funded embryonic stem cell research. Am I making a leap? No, not really. Watch the movie and then think about this memo.

If Lincoln 6 Echo deserves to live, why don’t the weakest and most defenseless deserve the same?