yacht film the island

Log in or Sign up

You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly. You should upgrade or use an alternative browser .

The power yacht at the end of The Island ?

Discussion in ' Powerboats ' started by laurentk , Sep 17, 2006 .

laurentk New Member

Hello guys, I am new to the forum, and desperatly trying to find the designer name of the yacht that you see at the end of the movie The Island. For those who didn't see it, but might have an idea, here is a (vague) description: must be aprroximately 120/150 feet, dark green body, looks very very futurist, dark (black smoked glass) cabin, and some kind of side parts at the back of the boat that can expand when berthing. Thank you so much ! Laurent  

I found it ! The most amazing boat ever (for me ....) This is it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/118_WallyPower http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c9/118WP.jpg http://extremetechnology.blogspot.com/2006/03/extreme-superyacht.html http://www.wally.com/default.asp?bflash=1 And pictures here: http://images.google.com/images?lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=118 WallyPower&sa=N&tab=wi http://flickr.com/search/?q=118 Wally Power&m=text Thx ! Laurent  

Willallison Senior Member

The Wally is an extraordinary vessel. Though the 118 is not without its flaws - for instance, it is apparently impossible to see the horizon, let alone the water from the helm whilst the boat is at speed! More importantly - was it a good film?  

Frosty Previous Member

3 RR turbine engines !!! one can only immagine what the fuel consumtion will be plus you will probably need a day to learn how to start them. Real macho stuff but of all the boats that have ever been called a millionares boat,-- then this must be it. Its ugliness is beyong description , but its ugliness becomes confusing to the mind to the point that you have to re calibrate ugly, untill its ugliness doesnt matter. Its as ugly as a tank, some people like tanks. A very strange boat-- you iether like it or you dont.  

Well, Jack, it's always the same questions. When facing a Honda Civic, everybody will agree on a common well designed car that rolls. When facing a Lamborghini Murciélago, some will love it, some will hate it, but none will stay "feelingless". So ... is it what we call art ? And is the WallyPower 118 a work of art ? However, I totally understand that someone would hate it ... I certainly agree with Will, for me, it is a beautiful vessel .... And I actually hapened to see it in real this summer in Bonifacio, Corsica, crusing in a turquoise bay.... And ..... wow. As for the movie, I loved the photography of the film .... very esthetic. I also liked the story, but this is debatable )  

Wayne Grabow Senior Member

World's most outstanding yachts There was a television tour of this yacht on a program whose topic was world's most outstanding yachts. It does have that love/hate reaction on people; certainly expands the universe of yacht types. The fuel bill must be it's most impressive statistic.  

wonder if that's available for download...  

If you go on the website, there is a promotional movie you can watch. Besides showing how esthetic this boat is (for the ones on the love side ), they also show in detail the how functional it is intended to be. AND to answer your question, they give the consumption .... and as I know nothing about the powerboat world .... I didn't really understand But I am sure you'll find it interesting !  

fish is a fish Junior Member

The fuel capacity is 5,812 gallons. Fuel consumption at top cruising speed is one liter per second, or about 15 gallons per minute! no thanks not with the gas prices in CA.  

vandutch Junior Member

Stealth "sex appeal" Boat This VanDutch boat may interest those that liked the boat featured in the Island. It has a stealth sex appeal with the same avant garde genre.  

Attached Files:

Vandutch_33.jpg, 500252_2c.jpg.

Andiamo Junior Member

Are you the builder of that Van Dutch?? The style rocks. How much change does it set a guy back and whats it top out at?  

longcours62 Junior Member

I never could understand : sex appeal ...for a boat ! But if you compare the forms of the Wally and the forms of Adastra In my point of view I found the second one more 'avant garde genre' and I don't ask about the the comparaison of the consumption betwen each of them !!  

adastra_afloat.jpg

Alik Senior Member

longcours62 said: ↑ I never could understand : sex appeal ...for a boat ! Click to expand...

It look Alik said: ↑ 'Sexy boat' usually means sleek nonsense of 100+ feet in length. It is like a 'sexy' woman - impractical, with terrible character and needs a lot of money to own/maintain Click to expand...

• Advertisement:

lol. well, this sexy one is not at 100+ feet. She must have wings (she was Redbull sponsored). She flies at an excess of 45 knots. She is for a type of personality, definitely not for everyone. The practicality depends on what you're looking for: if you're asking fuel consumption, depends on the model (i.e. engine choice). Character: what you see, no hidden agenda (unlike a sexy woman). Maintenance: the designer's choices had practicality in mind based on all the articles I've read about it. If you want her to strattle then take an Adastra because VanDutch's flexibility is measured in other regards.  

vandutch_REDBULL_PASSION.jpg

Foiler Power Yacht

Designing and building small tunnel hull powerboat

Looking for easy to build single outboard small power cat design in ply

Question regarding dual batteries on powerboat

New Power Catamarans

Searching for power cat plans

Get feet wet / Great Lakes / Loop sailboat - power conversion project

37’ Power Catamaran

Need to Hire a Designer - Power Cat

"we are testing the future"---powerboat foiler.

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

50 Things We Learned from Michael Bay’s ‘The Island’ Commentary

Michael Bay ‘s filmography is filled with big blockbuster hits, and of his thirteen feature films all but two of them grossed more than twice their budget — with most earning 3 – 5x the budget. 13 Hours (2016) failed to find an audience, but before that gung-ho military debacle Bay’s only real box-office misstep was 2005’s The Island . It’s a shame too as it’s a fun movie. Seriously. Sure it’s over-edited, illogical, and fairly cheesy at times, but the action is stellar, the score is fantastic, and it has just enough of an ethical argument at its core to make it thought-provoking. And again, it’s fun!

Keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary track for…

The Island (2005)

Commentator: Michael Bay (director)

1. “I was adamant that we do this bizarre dream sequence,” he says referring to the opening scenes showing Lincoln ( Ewan McGregor ) on a boat before being tossed in the water and drowned by unexplained mutants.

2. The opening landscapes were filmed off New Zealand while the boat scenes were shot near Italy.

3. That’s a real boat called the Wally Power. It came from Italy and cost the owner $25 million. “A little too modern for my taste, but at least I got it before Michael Mann got it for Miami Vice .”

4. “Art, story, and design have very much to do with when I’m working on a script,” he says, adding that they worked to develop a visual language and studied architectural references from Japan and futuristic designs.

5. Bay “called in a favor” to get Michael Clark Duncan in the film for two days of filming. “I figured since I discovered him in a gym and put him in Armageddon , and he went on to do Green Mile and get an Academy Award nomination.”

6. Part of his sales pitch to Duncan when casting him in Armageddon apparently involved the line: “You are going to be the first black man that does not die first. You are not going to die, and that is a twist.” It’s unclear if this is Bay being funny or if he really just needs to watch more movies.

7. The underground compound design is based on ideas regarding bunkers made to keep the president and other government officials alive after an attack for up to two years. That bled into the story too as the company is meant to be in business with the Pentagon studying how to clone an army. “You’ll see little references to that fact in the movie later.”

8. He told the actors playing the clones that they were essentially children. “That’s why a lot of them have this kind of childish innocence here, and it was something fun for the actors to play.”

9. Bay’s office kept getting yachting brochures sent to them for some reason. “I’m not going to go on a yacht trip and rent it for a quarter million dollars for a week, you gotta be out of your mind.” They weren’t for him, but it did make him recognize how beautiful the boats were and decided to make Lincoln a boat designer. “That’s how you get ideas in movies, they just right from your real life.”

10. The shot starting at 15:53 of the nano trackers crawling into Lincoln’s eye was accomplished with a special bellow lens that required a tremendous amount of light. The closeup on his eye being held opened involved ILM digital work and string glued to McGregor’s eyelids and then pulled. “Quite painful process, fun scene to do though.”

11. “Certain people” at Dreamworks wanted him to take out the scene with Jones ( Ethan Phillips ) showing Lincoln his scribbled conspiracy notes. “I opted to keep it in because to me this is the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest scene. This is the patient trying to figure out that something is wrong here, and I couldn’t have Lincoln be the only guy wondering.”

12. The scenes with Lincoln visiting James ( Steve Buscemi ) in the bowels of the facility were filmed in an old and unused power plant in Los Angeles. “Wouldn’t you know, the day we start shooting there, LA has some power outages and they called this generator plant to provide backup power.” It all powered on, and in addition to becoming so loud they had to wear “ear muffs” it also raised the interior temperatures to 110 degrees.

13. Bay felt that Caspian Tredwell-Owen ‘s original script was missing a scene showing how the clones are birthed and grow. “He thought it would be opening up Pandora’s Box to show that stuff, but I just think as a viewer it’s some of the cooler stuff to see.”

14. He credits Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci , who came on for rewrites, with adding a lot of great work to the second and third acts. The only specific example he gives, though, is the butterfly bit in the first act.

15. Some people seemed to think that all the product placements meant they “were whoring out the movie and making a commercial, but let’s face it guys, the world is focused on products. Products surround us, and for us to think in the year 2019 that we’re not going to still be focused and have products and labels flying at us from every different vantage point is just unreal.” That’s his official statement on accusations that he’s a whore.

16. The club scene took four hours to light, but when Bay arrived on set he felt it was “the unhippest place I’ve ever seen in my entire life.” The gaffer ( Michael Bauman ) and cinematographer ( Mauro Fiore ) were both new parents and were apparently unfamiliar with clubs. It’s at this point where Bay proceeds to mimic Fiore’s Italian accent.

17. The “dude” bit was an improv at his suggestion after realizing that the word has more than a dozen meanings.

18. Steven Spielberg said McGregor “looked like a young Harrison Ford when he saw the dailies.”

19. He thinks Scarlett Johansson is going to have an amazing career. “Not only is she a pain in the ass to work with, and I mean that in the best way, she is classy, she’s feisty, she’s just very daring.”

20. The original script was set one hundred years in the future, but they kept bringing it closer to the present for budgetary reasons.

21. The location where they filmed the medical hallways were shot in an unused headquarters built for a high-tech company for $250 million. They presumably went bust before being able to use the building.

22. The post-birth scene — the clone has given birth and the doctors are taking the baby and euthanizing the woman — was a major reason why Bay took on the film.

23. Editors for the airline version wanted to cut the scene above, but Bay said absolutely not. He insisted it stay, and they said at least remove the stirrups. He again said no, and they compromised by blurring them out.

24. McGregor improvised the slide along the floor at 40:23.

25. He was “the first guy in the country” to have the compact Arriflex 235, and he goes on to sing its praises for handheld shots.

Related Topics: Commentary Commentary , Michael Bay , The Island

Recommended Reading

• Festival Reports
• Book Reviews
• Great Directors
• Great Actors
• Special Dossiers
• Past Issues
• Support us on Patreon

Subscribe to Senses of Cinema to receive news of our latest cinema journal. Enter your email address below:

• Thank you to our Patrons
• Style Guide
• Advertisers
• Call for Contributions

The Cinema Within: spectacle, labour and utopia in Michael Bay’s The Island

In this article, I will analyse Michael Bay’s The Island (2005) as a cinematic spectacle which, through its imaginating of a particular dystopian future, lays bare the machinery of spectacular visuality that is crucial to the mode of Hollywood spectacle cinema that Bay’s work is often held to exemplify. I will suggest that the formal apparatus of the utopia/dystopia, and of science fiction itself, allows for a reading of The Island as a kind of self-conscious critique of spectacle cinema within the formal apparatus of spectacle cinema, which works in part through thematising visuality and in part through making visible the very apparatus of cinematic production itself. In this, I will draw upon the work of Jonathan Beller, and in particular his book The Cinematic Mode of Production , and a mode of film theory and criticism in which cinema is foundationally implicated in the production of ideology. In Beller’s work, which draws on Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson, ‘cinema’ can be understood not only as an effect of the circuits of late capital, where spectacle is an extension of ideology, but as a means by which capital extends its operations into new productive domains, into attention and the ‘work’ of spectatorship. My reading of The Island suggests that it is a particularly important film in Bay’s oeuvre, in that it marks a point at which Bay’s visual strategies of cinematic spectacle turn back on themselves and the formal presentation of visuality within a utopian/dystopian paradigm affords the potential for critique, both within and without the film.

In ‘Entertainment and Utopia’, his landmark article on the relation between popular cinema and modes of reception, Richard Dyer traces a continuity between a form of utopian longing, ‘the image of “something better” to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives don’t provide’, and forms of entertainment produced within ‘patriarchal capitalism’. (1) The formal difference between entertainment and the formal utopia ‘is contained in the feelings it embodies. It presents, head-on as it were, what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized’. (2) Dyer does not present this potential unproblematically; he notes how in entertainment there is a ‘struggle between capital (the backers) and labour (the performers) over control of the product’, but that ‘as a relatively autonomous mode of cultural production, it does not simply reproduce unproblematically patriarchal-capitalist ideology’. (3) In this light, then, can we say that Bay’s The Island is able to negotiate a space of critique of contemporary conditions of spectacular capitalism? Does it have ‘relative autonomy’ to the economic and representational systems of which it both partakes and presents in estranged form? These are questions which this article will pursue, if not answer.

The Island deliberately re-works utopian and dystopian images and tropes, and has clear generic relations to literary works such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World . The first part of the film is located in a ‘utopia’ (clearly indebted in its mise-en-scéne to earlier dystopian films such as THX1138 (1970) and Logan’s Run (1976)), located in what seems to be a post-apocalyptic world where survivors of some kind of biological catastrophe are maintained inside a controlled environment. As the film progresses, the machineries of the controlled society are gradually revealed from the point of view of an increasingly alienated and questioning protagonist, the ‘agnate’ Lincoln Six Echo, played by Ewan MacGregor. The viewer, then Lincoln himself, become aware that the world of The Island is a simulacrum, a construction created by Dr Merrick (Sean Bean) to create and sustain clones of wealthy ‘sponsors’, which may be used for the purposes of organ donation, surrogate pregnancy, or other purposes. When the ‘citizens’ (the clones) ‘win the lottery’ and are relocated to The Island, the last uncontaminated spot on Earth, they are in fact taken out of the sealed environment and are subjected to medical procedures which inevitably result in their death. The second part of the film is an extended chase narrative, where the escaped Lincoln and his partner/ lover Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson) attempt to understand the ‘real’ (near-future) world into which they have escaped through a form of primal confrontation with Lincoln’s original or ‘sponsor’. I will read the first part of the film as an investigation into the hidden machineries of power and control which serve to construct a delusive world for the agnates to believe in, which operates as a staging of the apparatus of cinema as a technology of spectacle and ideological deformation; and I will then propose the second half of the film as a reversal of the terms of the first, as escape into the conditions of spectacle cinema, where cinema itself becomes a kind of utopia, an escape from work into leisure, pleasure or the delirium of Bay’s hyper-kinetic narrative.

To establish the relation between cinema and ideology that is at the centre of my reading of The Island , I will first turn to Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni. It should be understood that Comolli and Narboni, as does Jonathan Beller, use ‘cinema’ not simply to mean the dominant (Hollywood) mode of cinematic production, but as a structural term for considering the relation between ideology and representation. This article is self-consciously revisiting that mode of ideological reading of cinema, but I should say here that I am not making a case for a totalised and ahistorical characterisation of cinematic production. I would rather propose Michael Bay’s cinema as a particular instance of a contemporary ‘cinematic mode of production’, with Beller’s theoretical intervention strongly to the fore in reading spectacle and visuality as effects of the circuits of late capitalist production. Although writing in 1972, and therefore before the advent of Hollywood spectacle cinema in its effects-driven maturity (after Star Wars (1977)), Comolli and Narboni identify a fruitful ideological reading of cinema:

Clearly, the cinema ‘reproduces’ reality’: this is what a camera and film stock are for – so says the ideology. But the tools and techniques of film-making are a part of prevailing ideology. Seen in this light, the classic theory of cinema that the camera is an impartial instrument which grasps, or rather is impregnated by, the world in its ‘concrete reality’ is an eminently reactionary one. What the camera in fact registers is the vague, unformulated, untheorized, unthought-out world of the dominant ideology. (4)

Drawing upon an Althusserian definition of ideology, wherein ‘Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’, Comolli and Narboni go on to suggest that ‘Cinema is one of the languages through which the world communicates itself to itself. They constitute its ideology for they reproduce the world as it is experienced when filtered through the ideology’. (5) Cinema becomes an ideological apparatus , in Althusser’s terms, presenting the ‘imaginary relationships of individuals to their real conditions of existence’. Comolli and Narboni (following Althusser) implicate cinema as ideology itself , a means by which the ‘imaginary relationships’ of ‘Ideology’ frame people’s understanding of the world.

How, then, to escape the all-encompassing determinism of an Althusserian Ideology, where cinema is always-already re-inscribed in the machinery of ideological reproduction and domination? Comolli and Narboni suggest that it is cinema’s status as a communicative act that allows the possibility of cinema to talk about itself , to assume a meta-critical discourse within the film itself:

The film is ideology presenting itself to itself, talking to itself, learning about itself. Once we realize that it is the nature of the system to turn cinema into an instrument of ideology, we can see the film-maker’s first task is to show up the cinema’s so-called ‘depiction of reality’. If he can do so there is a chance we will be able to disrupt or possibly even sever the connection between the cinema and its ideological function. (6)

In talking about itself, then, the film is able to demonstrate that it is talking ideologically. It cannot escape ideology, but it can bring its own ideological practices into view and thereby, for the viewer, allow a disruption between the ‘depiction of reality’ (or ‘imaginary relationships’) and the everyday ‘real’. This functions by way of estrangement which, in Darko Suvin’s famous definition of science fiction, is the genre’s ideological potential. Suvin defines science fiction as:

a literary genre or verbal construct whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment. (7)

Working also in a Marxian tradition, Suvin proposes that science fiction’s particular ability is that, through the presentation of a world alternate to the reader’s (or viewer’s) own ( estrangement ), the text is able to provoke a kind of thoughtful dislocation ( cognition ) in the reader/viewer in which the very ideological constructedness of the ‘real’ world is revealed through the presentation of an alternative other. This definition of the genre, very-well known and influential yet still controversial within the field (largely for what the definition excludes as sf), is partly a consequence of Suvin’s reading of science fiction’s generic history (itself still contested), in which he places the Utopian tradition at its core. Indeed, the similarity of Suvin’s definition of science fiction, above, to the definition of utopian fiction he offers, is manifest:

Utopia is, then, a literary genre or verbal construction whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence of a particular quasi-human community where socio-political institutions, norms and individual relationships are organized on a more perfect principle than in the author’s community, this construction being based on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis . (8)

What science fiction and the utopian tradition share, then, is the potential for ideological work upon the reader (or viewer), in the potential for estrangement, for bringing Ideology into view. The Ideological ‘depiction of reality’ (in an Althusserian sense) may be disrupted by the very generic apparatus that forms the text.

The double movement of estrangement, in which the ‘real’ is recognised in the representation of another world/ time, and its familiar structures made strange, is not only an effect of science fiction or utopia, of course. Estrangement effects reveal the relation between text and world in Modernist fragmentation, in postmodernist ‘self-consciousness’ and meta-textuality, and in the formal apparatus of modes in which the system of representation leaves an aporia or absence where some matter has been ‘hidden’. In Stephen Heath’s ideological reading of cinema in Questions of Cinema , he proposes a ‘something else’ that is repressed by the film Touch of Evil (1958), a freight which is present and ‘which criticism does not fail to respond’ but which the film itself cannot explicitly acknowledge. (9) Deploying a Freudian discourse to a mixture of ideological and semiotic criticism, Heath rather poetically concludes his reading of the film by stating:

The something else, the other film of which this film says everywhere the slips and slides: the narrative of the film and the history of that narrative, the economy of its narrative production, its logic. To approach, to experience the textual system can only be to pull the film onto this double scene, this process of its order and of the material that order contains, of the narrative produced and the terms of its production. Analysis must come to deal with this work of the film, in which it is, exactly, the death – itself the disturbance – of any given cinema. (10)

For Heath, the film is a signifying system which hides or cannot acknowledge its symbolic freight, but which contains this ‘double’ signification, but within and without the film. The insistence on the work of the film – earlier, Heath argues that ‘the film must hang together; the narrative, therefore, must work’ – is both an ideological and a symbolic work, but one in which the very means of production of the film are hidden codes within it. (11)

As I suggested above, it is the particular function of the genres of science fiction and utopian fiction to bring the hidden ‘double’ of the text – the time and place of its own production – into view through estrangement. In Bay’s The Island , this is explicitly presented through the collision of two worlds – the underground ‘utopia’ in which Lincoln Six Echo lives – but also in the way in which visual technologies are themselves part of the fabric of the film, as a machinery through which the denizens of ‘utopia’ are deceived as to their condition and future. While I am not going so far as to suggest that The Island is a Marxian film, its playful mining of the tradition of utopia leads to the exposure of its own codes of production, which are explicitly spectacular. The very imaging technologies, operated by groups of undifferentiated technicians, which form the illusory Island are the very ones which produce The Island . In this way, Bay’s film stages the hidden codes that are outside itself, and performs a double estrangement: in terms of the narrative, and in terms of genre. I will return to this shortly.

Before doing so, I would like to explore in more detail the connection between ideology and spectacle, particularly through the influential work of Guy Debord and his text The Society of the Spectacle. Debord, a key member of the Situationist International, theorised a shift in the ideological construction of reality through the pervasive immersion of human beings in technological mediation. Debord’s fourth section of The Society of the Spectacle consists entirely of the phrase: ‘The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images’. (12) This appears to be, if not a restatement of Althusser’s definition of Ideology as ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’, then at least a parallel statement of the interrelation between ideology and representation. The spectacle is not simply media, or film, or television, or advertising; it is a ‘social relation among people’, constructing the very experience of the real. Debord continues:

The spectacle, grasped in its totality, is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. (13)

The spectacle becomes the totality of social relations; it ‘is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation […] It is the historical movement in which we are caught’. (14) Graham MacPhee, in The Architecture of the Visible (2002) suggests that ‘Debord’s account of the spectacle offers itself as an extension of [Georg] Lukàcs conception of reification to the realm of visual experience’. (15) Reification is a term used to theorise a reduction, in capitalist economies and modern systematization, of human social relations to a relation between things, an extension of commodification into lived experience. MacPhee suggests that Debord himself reduces Lukàcs’ conceptualization in ‘wholly identif[ying] spectacular vision with “the incessant spread of the precise technical rationality” of modern thought’; the consequences of this are that ‘[i]n identifying visual experience with systematic unity of modern thought, Debord not only accepts modern thought’s claims to unity and coherence, but also drastically reduces the possibilities of critique’. (16) The difference between Lukàcs and Debord is summarised thus: ‘the moments of incoherence [in lived experience] that Lukàcs saw as the opportunity for developing immanent critique are misrecognized by Debord as the necessary and unavoidable condition of reified experience’. This leads to what MacPhee diagnoses as the ‘unrelenting picture of total domination and total passivity implied by Debord’s account of the spectacle’. (17) Debord’s ‘spectacle’ presents the same problems for critique as does Althusser’s Ideology; but the potential of spectacle to lay bare its own visualising technologies is crucial to MacPhee’s reading of trompe l’oeil , and in particular Jean Baudrillard’s use of trompe l’oeil as a metaphor for simulation in Seduction . MacPhee notes that, in Seduction ,

Instead of seeing vision as a transaction which either returns the illusory substantiality of a ‘real’ world or the blank image of simulation, the unsettling effect of tromp l’oeil [ sic ] points to another experience altogether: what is returned or made visible within the jarring experience of tromp l’oeil are the conditions of visuality themselves. (18)

MacPhee suggests that, unlike Baudrillard’s theorisation of simulacra in Simulacra and Simulations , in which he famously (or notoriously) proposed the orders of simulation in which the contemporary mode of signification is one in which a free-floating sign-system of contemporary images becomes its own pure simulacrum, entirely free from the ‘real’, the idea of the trompe l’oeil is inherently estranging and offers a potential opening for critique. Baudrillard himself writes:

the trompe l’oeil does not seek to confuse itself with the real. Consciously produced by means of play and artifice, it presents itself as a simulacrum. By mimicking the third dimension, it questions the reality of this dimension, and by mimicking and exceeding the effects of the real, it radically questions the reality principle. (19)

Trompe l’oeil therefore oscillates between the ‘real’ and the ‘simulacrum’, and in this ‘mimicking’ introduces an element of estrangement. It is a double vision, both real and unreal, both material and artificial: ‘suddenly this seizure rebounds onto the so-called “real” world, to reveal that this “reality” is naught but a staged world’. (20) Trompe l’oeil is thereby a form of visual estrangement, and can be turned to purposes of critique.

Where The Matrix (1999) (wonderfully described by Jonathan Beller as ‘the late-capitalist social-realist film’ in The Cinematic Mode of Production ) self-consciously staged its world-games through Baudrillardian lenses, to the extent of referencing Simulations and Simulacra within the mise-en-scène , Michael Bay’s The Island instead relies upon the estranging double movement of the trompe l’oeil . (21) The scenario of The Island is that its inhabitants live in a post-catastrophe ‘utopia’ (a highly regulated and enclosed system) who are subject to a lottery wherein they have the chance to leave for ‘the Island’, the only remaining natural habitat outside of the walls of utopia that remains uncontaminated by whatever biological catastrophe is presumed to have befallen the human race and the Earth’s ecology. The Island is a green paradise set among crystal-blue seas, an idealised space that is first encountered at the very beginning of the film in a narrative sequence that is revealed to be a dream, experienced by Lincoln Six Echo. The escape to the Island is symbolically attached to dream-work, a crucial element of The Island (as I shall explore below); but it is also cinematic spectacle, presented to the viewer across several levels of the film’s diegesis (as Lincoln’s dream, as the illusory zone of escape within the machinery of utopia and, at the end of the film, as a ‘real’ space attained by Lincoln and his fellow escapee from utopia, Jordan Two Delta).

The mise-en-scène of The Island juxtaposes the lush, tropical Island, seen by the inhabitants on wall-sized television screens as well as through a ‘window’ onto an outside ‘reality’, with the blue/grey palette of the reinforced concrete, chrome and glass that make up the physical fabric of utopia, as well as the (branded) white Lycra sports gear that make up the inhabitants’ uniform. The ‘green world’ outside the (glass) walls of Utopia is a motif that derives, ultimately, from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We , but where Zamyatin’s utopia used transparency as an index of the dystopian state’s surveillance and control by imagining apartment blocks made of strengthened glass, The Island ’s use of transparency is to do with the illusory imaging power of visual technologies: the seeming difference between the televisions and the windows masks their underlying equivalence. The ‘windows’ in fact look out onto a cylindrical holographic projection, visible from anywhere in ‘Utopia’, that acts as a 360° panorama, a visual prison that replicates the shape of Bentham’s Panopticon but reverses the direction of the gaze (as it does the direction of the gaze in We ): the subjects look out upon the spectacle presented to them as ‘real’, and it is their belief that this spectacle is real that controls them. The trompe l’oeil of the window is implicated in technological spectacle by its homology with the wall-sized television screens; when Lincoln and Jordan discover the holographic projection mid-way through the film, on effecting their escape from utopia, this completes a visual circuit for the viewer that had been suggested much earlier in the film.

The homology between the visualising technologies within the diegesis, and those that bring The Island to the cinema or television screen before the viewer, is the way in which Bay’s trompe l’oeil opens up the codes of cinematic spectacle (that is the currency of his films) to the possibility of critique. Just as Lincoln and Jordan are deceived by the power of the visual, so may we be; just as they are relieved of their delusions, so may we be. For the viewer, the narrative revelation that the ‘Utopia’ is a manufactured illusion is produced not only by identification with Lincoln’s trajectory of alienation from the codes and doxa of the Utopia in which he lives (doubts and questions that are shared among many of the inhabitants, it is suggested), but by the progressive revelation of the hidden machinery of Utopia which maintains the system. It quickly becomes apparent that Lincoln is able to access (albeit illegitimately) areas of ‘Utopia’ which are entirely staffed by ‘workers’, particularly in visiting Mac (Steve Buscemi), who operates the machinery of Utopia in levels or zones which are typically hidden from the denizens of Utopia.

This is curious, in some ways, because the guards, the medical staff, and the canteen staff are entirely visible to both Lincoln and the viewer, but are somehow unseen . These ‘visible’ workers are of the same status as those who work the machinery ‘behind the scenes’; although visible, they do not play the lottery, and are thereby workers not citizens . This implied hierarchy (of visibility) is a form of biopolitics, a distinction between zoē and bios , between ‘bare life’ and political existence, that Giorgio Agamben elucidates in Homo Sacer . Agamben suggested that a decisive transition in modernity can be said to come at the point at which ‘bare life’, zoē , previously excluded from ‘political life’ (the fully human), was drawn into the sphere of the political. Agamben writes:

the fundamental categorical pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/ political existence, zoē / bios , exclusion/inclusion. There is politics because man is a living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion. (22)

Modern democracy, then, ‘is constantly trying to transform its own bare life into a way of life and to find, so to speak, the bios of zoē ’. (23) The world of The Island is structured by a radical division between zoē and bios , between the ‘bare life’ of the workers (excluded from the possibility of escaping to the Island) and the ‘political existence’ of those who play the lottery: between exclusion and inclusion. The distinction between zoē and bios seems to be organized through the ascription of labour: in The Island , it first appears that it is work that separates ‘citizen’ from ‘worker’, those who may attain the state of natural grace symbolized by the Island and those who remain excluded from it.

Rather than being a privileged class that are sustained by the labour of a biopolitically-excluded working class, it is revealed that the white-clad inhabitants of Utopia, like Lincoln and Jordan, are ‘agnates’, clones that have been grown and nurtured within a closed social system in order to maintain their optimum biological health in order for that health (in the form of organs or, in one case, as a surrogate parent) to be harvested by the ‘sponsor’ or biological original. Just as the Eloi are fed and supported by the Morlocks as ‘product’ or as human cattle in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine , the agnates are produced as disposable biological entities which act as a form of ambulatory insurance policies: against disease, accident, or other form of biological hazard. The biopolitical field is reversed: zoē becomes bios , the workers are the ‘true’ citizens, for they are not simply ‘product’ without the right to life. Mac, who helps Lincoln and Jordan when they escape, tells them: ‘You’re not human… not real… not like a real person, not like me… you’re clones… copies’; although, it must be added, that Mac’s own right to life is held to little account by those who are sent to retrieve Lincoln and Jordan, and he is murdered in helping them escape to Los Angeles.

The film striates the use of work or labour as a marker of zoē and bios in scenes where Lincoln, Jordan and others are put to work in the Department of Labor. This seems entirely redundant; what they do – squirt liquids into tubes, which are then fed down to developing agnates at levels hidden from them – could be much more easily and less problematically be accomplished by machine. Setting the inhabitants to work is clearly to do with the sense of purpose that Merrick suggests is crucial for the longevity of the human organism (experiments with agnates in a persistent vegetative state were unsuccessful); the sense of purpose and of hope that also necessitates the lottery for escape to the Island, one which also rationalizes the disappearance of fellow citizens when their ‘sponsors’ require their organs. The ‘real’ work of monitoring, guarding and feeding the inhabitants is invisible to them, while their own work operates somewhere between childish emulation/ play and routinized distraction. When Lincoln ascends the levels to find the other machinery of Utopia – the operating theatres and medical technicians who take organs from the ‘product’ and send them on to the sponsors – it reveals the true work or labour that he and his fellow inhabitants have been engaged upon: to develop and maintain physical health so this may be transmitted to the sponsor at a time of need. As we will see shortly, this biology exceeds its design parameters and the system that produces it, eventually destroying the system itself.

The connection between the hidden work and machinery of Utopia, and the trompe l’oeil spectacle of the Island, offers a potential to read The Island not as a political parable but as a critique of the power of spectacle itself, and in particular the imaging technologies of cinema that are themselves hidden in the construction of the spectacle film. Here, I wish to turn to the work of Jonathan Beller, in particular The Cinematic Mode of Production , as a means by which to articulate a critique of the nexus of work, visuality and spectacle, and how the work of the spectator , in terms of a burgeoning ‘attention economy’, is inscribed into the narrative of The Island . In The Cinematic Mode of Production Beller draws upon the work of Jonathan Crary (although he only cites his work a couple of times), in particular Techniques of the Observer and Suspensions of Perception to frame a Marxian reading of the relation between cinema and economy through regimes of attention. Crary, in both books, sets out a historical analysis of the shift in strategies by which the human sensorium was programmed to adapt to the repetitive tasks of industrial production, particularly during and after the 19 th century. Crary, in Suspensions of Perception argued that the idea of attention became increasingly investigated in the fields of both psychology and optics in the 19 th century because of the perceived tendency in human workers towards distraction , in what Crary calls ‘an emergent economic system that demanded attentiveness of a subject in a wide range of new productive and spectacular tasks, but whose internal movement was continually eroding the basis of any disciplinary attentiveness’. (24) The conditions of a ‘modern’, industrial, increasingly consumption– as well as production– oriented economy, pulled the human subject in two directions. Firstly, what Walter Benjamin called the ‘shock’ of modern existence (urban living, machinery, speed, advertising) creates an increasingly distracted subject in an increasingly kaleidoscopic world; and secondly, the very economic conditions that produce this kind of world require a working subject who is able to maintain long periods of attentiveness to complex and repetitive tasks (over a 10- or 12-hour working day in a factory, for instance). Beller extends Crary’s mode of analysis into a Marxian reading of contemporary capital which, he argues, is historically coterminous with the rise of cinema and the development of a society of the spectacle. Beller’s work is more than an elucidation of Debord, however; though he proposes ‘the cinema’ to mean ‘the manner in which production generally becomes organised in such a way that […] creates an image that […] is essential to the general management, organisation and movement of the economy’, the focus is upon production rather than alienation, and in particular the construction of a spectatorial subjectivity that is put to work . (25) As we saw above, Jean-Luc Comolli had asserted the relation between cinema and ideology and, as quoted by Beller, that ‘the spectator …works’. (26) Crucially, Beller identifies the turning of human attention to productive ends to be an effect of capitalist economies that seek new territories to exploit:

From a systemic point of view, cinema arises out of a need for the intensification of the extraction of value from human bodies beyond normal physical and spatial limits and beyond normal working hours – it is an innovation that will combat the generalized falling rate of profit. It realizes capitalist tendencies toward the extension of the work day (via entertainment, email), the deterritorialization of the factory (through cottage industry, TV), the marketing of attention (the advertisers), the building of media pathways (formerly roads), and the retooling of subjects. (27)

The spatial paradigm – territory, expansion, colonisation – is connected to a Marxian analysis of accumulation, wherein the exhaustion of resources and the ‘falling rate of profit’ necessitates the acquisition of new ‘territories’. The political collective RETORT, in their book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War , read the ‘War on Terror’ following 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq in terms of Marx’s ‘primitive accumulation’, a return to an age of ‘violent expropriation’ that particularly marked the age of colonialism, but one that is marked by new conditions of mediation: ‘primitive accumulation is to be carried out in conditions of spectacle: that is the new reality in a nutshell’. (28) RETORT find a kernel of hope in this spectacular turn:

A new round of technical innovation has made alienation-into-a-realm-of-images a pervasive, banal, consistently self-administered reality . The dystopian potential of such an apparatus is sufficiently clear. But in present circumstances it has at least the benign side-effect of making control of imagery that is a necessity of war and occupation, as opposed to the tendential and structural ‘management’ of appearances appropriate to peacetime – truly hard to maintain. (29)

As with the trompe l’oeil , the conditions of visuality of the spectacle themselves offer the possibility of critique in their very visibility . Beller is critical of Afflicted Powers , and what he characterises as its weakness of ‘understanding of the relationship between media and what the collective calls “primitive accumulation”’, in its emphasis on 9/11 as a ‘huge blow to the state’s control and organization of the spectacle’ and its organisation of the invasion of Iraq as a ‘quasi-hysterical endeavour to overcome this defeat in the spectacle’. Beller’s focus, instead, is upon ‘the necessary daily calibration of spectators […] as well as the transformed proprioception of subjects’. (30) Where RETORT propose primitive accumulation operating on a macrocosmic or geo-political scale, expropriating the oil fields of Iraq, Beller suggests that it is the interior landscapes of subjectivity that are the focus of economic exploitation; the human body and the human sensorium are, for capital, ‘the next frontier’. (31) One should note that in his most recent book, 24/7 , Jonathan Crary has proposed a similar extension of disciplinary regimes (his approach is more overtly Foucauldian than Marxian) into previously ‘free’ areas: not only the elimination of ‘the useless time of reflection and contemplation’, but the extension of productivity through the minimising or evacuation of the need for sleep. (32) Crary juxtaposes the space/time of reflection with the imperatives of economic expansion and exploitation, wherein ‘reverie’ is outside the disciplinary regimes of labour: ‘[o]ne of the forms of disempowerment within 24/7 environments is the incapacitation of daydream or of any mode of absent-minded introspection that would otherwise occur in intervals of slow or vacant time. […] There is a profound incompatibility of anything resembling reverie with the priorities of efficiency, functionality, and speed’. (33) Where Beller differs is that in his analysis, unconsciousness and dream has already been produced by the conditions of cinema .

As I noted above, The Island begins with shots of a crystalline blue sea, a rocky coastline and islands, as something out of a tourist advertisement or glossy travelogue. This effect is magnified when a large, angular motor yacht appears, upon which Lincoln and Jordan pose in the sun. This scene, clearly imbued with jet-set fantasy, is then disrupted: anonymous threatening men appear, who push Lincoln from the boat and struggle with him underwater. After a rapid montage, Lincoln awakes in the utopian facility, and the foregoing sequence is revealed as a dream. Although dreams are monitored in The Island – Dr Merrick conducts analytical sessions with Lincoln, where the latter draws the boat – they are not manipulated within the minds of the inhabitants, and in fact operate as a separate and in some senses free space of unconscious drives. When trying to escape, Lincoln and Jordan fall into a conditioning room where recently birthed agnates are subjected to a barrage of televisual programming, broadcast by arrays of mini-monitors. In a clear reference to A Clockwork Orange (1971), the agnates’ eyelids are held open while the ‘messages’ are broadcast directly into their eyes, forming their subjectivity. If this acts as a kind of ‘unconscious’ sub-stratum of foundational conditioning, Lincoln’s dream-work exposes an unconscious beneath this unconscious, a double subjectivity which repeats his own condition as agnate/ clone. Dr Merrick begins to understand that what Lincoln Six Echo has been dreaming is built upon the memories of Tom Lincoln (also played by MacGregor, but with a Scottish accent, and as an amoral, exploitative, privileged creep), not the shallow draught of time in which Lincoln Six Echo has lived in the facility. These dreams, a ‘biological’ excess which compromise Lincoln’s status as ‘copy’ (to an extant that, during one of the later chase sequences, Lincoln is able to successfully imitate his ‘sponsor’ and avoid being killed), signify at once the irreducibility and transmissibility of dream-space and fantasy. It is not, ultimately, recuperable to the imperatives of control that are fashioned by Dr Merrick and which are continually administered by the hidden machineries of utopia/dystopia.

At the close of the film, where Lincoln and Jordan sit aboard the yacht in reality , the film closes by supplanting ‘the real’ with ‘the dream’, just as Lincoln and Jordan have supplanted their ‘real’ sponsors. In fact, the film suggests that Lincoln and Jordan are better human beings than their sponsors, and the fantasy mobility of the yacht can be considered some kind of reward. However, I think it is possible to argue, particularly in terms of genre, that an escape into fantasy has already been enacted much earlier in the film, at the point at which Lincoln and Jordan escape from ‘utopia’. The facility, it emerges, is underground, funded by the US Defense Department, and in the middle of the desert in the American South-West. Soon after ascending from the facility, Lincoln and Jordan come across a road, and it is the road of the American imaginary of automobility, Route 66: as they run down it towards the nearest town, the film shifts generically from dystopia to chase film, as Merrick engages Albert Laurent (Djimon Hounsou), a French Special Forces veteran, to track down and eliminate the fleeing agnates. Meeting Mac at a roadside bar, Lincoln and Jordan enlist his help in fleeing to Los Angeles to confront their sponsors. Even here, the visual register insists upon spaces ‘behind’ the public façade, the ‘hidden machinery’. Lincoln first catches up with Mac as he sits upon the toilet in the Men’s rest room; at a nearby Maglev station, pursued by Laurent’s henchmen, Lincoln and Jordan run into old workshops, junkyards and sheds, in order to escape. The transition from the ‘private’ (and securitized) space of the underground facility to the public spaces of the ‘real world’ is effected piecemeal, as the escaped couple are exposed to tracking technologies when in the open. In becoming fugitives, they exchange one form of enclosure and secured space for another.

In Los Angeles, Bay’s camera also becomes significantly more mobile. A long chase sequence along a freeway, where Lincoln tumbles large railway wheels from a flatbed truck onto the chasing cars, is madly kinetic and spectacular; when a flying ‘jetbike’ turns up, which is then used by Lincoln and Jordan, CGI becomes particularly intrusive. As the couple zoom among the towers of Los Angeles’ downtown, the CGI becomes ‘bad’, a visible rather than invisible trucage . This, however, is surely deliberate; just as Ewan MacGregor’s American accent as Lincoln Six Echo is considerably less authentic but more attractive than his ‘real’ Scottish one as Tom Lincoln (trading upon MacGregor’s star persona as Scottish ‘bloke’), and Lincoln’s impersonation of Tom Lincoln a crucial blurring (or more properly overturning) of agnate/sponsor, artificial/ real binaries, the intrusiveness of the ‘unreal’ CGI indicates that, in the rhetoric of the film, the fantasy supersedes or is ‘better’ than the real. Lincoln Six Echo and Jordan Two Delta, perfectly toned young adults, objects of the desiring gaze (doubly staged in the case of Johansson, who is the agnate of a film star/ Calvin Klein model who appears to be Johansson herself), are improvements (or upgrades) upon their sponsors, possessed of greater agency and ethical sense, whose affective superiority goes beyond Tom Lincoln’s amoral individualism towards both romantic love and a greater sense of collectivity. Before escaping into the fantasy mobility of Tom Lincoln’s motor-yacht and jet-set lifestyle, they return to the facility to free their fellow agnates.

When the two protagonists escape from Dystopia and enter Bay’s territory, the kinetic chase film, they are not escaping into the ‘real’ (as the freed clones seem to do at the end of the film); instead, they are escaping into cinema , into its fantasy or liberatory potential.While the ‘thriller’ elements of the chase narrative seem to infect the world of Merrick’s facility when he brutally kills another questioning agnate, Gandu Three Echo (Brian Stepanek), with a syringe to the neck, the condition of the trompe l’oeil that allowed the possibility of critique through the visibility of visibility in the ‘utopia’ also regulates the spectacle of the second half of the film. The very end of the film promises an escape from the regimes of work (administration, attention, the biological purpose of the agnates) into a fantasy of leisure and pleasure. The accelerated camera-movement and CGI is not simply a technical and structural element of Bay’s filmmaking, but a release from stasis into ecstatic movement, and the promise of a release from the (dystopian) work of cinematic production into the dream-work of fantastical spectacle. In a sense, The Island attempts to reverse the polarity of ‘spectacle’ itself: from Debord’s and Beller’s imaging system of production and consumption, implicated in opening out new productive territories and colonising subjectivity, spectacle instead becomes a means by which to induce dream, fantasy, a space outside of the regimes of administration and control identified by Beller and Crary.

To conclude, we can return to a much earlier mode of analysis of cinema, the relation of dreaming/ daydreaming and spectatorship proposed by Siegfried Kracauer in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality . For Kracauer, cinema induces a state of daydreaming that exceeds the signifying economy of a particular film. ‘The moviegoer watches the images on the screen in a dream-like state’, Kracauer suggests:

[a] trance-like immersion in a shot or a succession of shots may at any moment yield to daydreaming which increasingly disengages itself from the imagery occasioning it. Whenever this happens, the dreaming spectator, who originally concentrated on the psychological correspondences of an image striking his imagination more or less imperceptibly, moves on from them to notions beyond the orbit of that image. (34)

This, then, is the capacity that confirms Lincoln Six Echo’s alienation from the dystopian system of the facility, the excess of dreaming which leads him behind the trompe l’oeil to the machineries. It is the importance of the cinema within , the fantasy/ dream imagery with which the film begins and ends, which propels Lincoln towards liberation, and that is what The Island proposes for its own spectators. As Kracauer proposes, ‘the moviegoer finds himself in a situation in which he cannot ask questions and grope for answers unless he is saturated physiologically’: that ‘unless’, the necessity for immersion in the dream, motivates the precedence of spectacle over narrative, fantasy over the ‘real’. (35) It is fantasy, the dream, that in The Island and in Bay’s cinema tout court , is the source and site of utopia. When Richard Dyer states, in ‘Entertainment and Utopia’, that the problem for conceptualising entertainment as utopia is that ‘entertainment provides alternatives to capitalism which will be provided by capitalism’, the ‘escape’ offered by The Island is thrown into stark relief (36); in a sense, for Bay, the solution to the problem of spectacle is spectacle, the way out of the cinematic mode of production is cinema itself.

This article has been peer reviewed. 

1 . Dyer, Richard. ‘Entertainment and Utopia’, in Only Entertainment . London: Routledge, 2002: 20.

4. Comolli, Jean-Luc and Jean Narboni. ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’. In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings , edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 752-9: 755.

5. Ibid . 755

6. Althusser, Louis. ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’. In Lenin and Philosophy and other essays , translated by Ben Brewster. London: NLB, 1971. 123-173: 153; Comolli and Narboni, 755.

7. Suvin, Darko. ‘Science Fiction and Utopian Fiction: Degrees of Kinship’. In Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction . Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. 33-43: 37.

9. Heath, Stephen. Questions of Cinema. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981: 143.

11 . Ibid. 134

12. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle . Detroit: Red and Black, 1983. [n.p.]: section 4.

13. Ibid. section 6

14. Ibid. section 11

15. MacPhee, Graham. Architecture of the Visible: Technology and Urban Visual Culture. London and New York: Continuum, 2002: 72.

16. Ibid. 73; 74

17. Ibid. 74; 75

18. Ibid. 81

19. Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990: 63.

21. Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Lebanon NH: University of New England Press, 2006: 7.

22. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life . Translated by Daniel Heller-Roszen. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1998: 12.

23. Ibid. 13

24. Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture . Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2001: 29; Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1990.

25. Beller, op. cit. 10

26. Ibid. 11

27. Ibid. 13

28. RETORT (Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts). Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. London and New York: Verso, 2005: 75; 187.

29. Ibid. 187

30. Beller, op. cit. 284; 285

31. Ibid. 202

32. Crary, Jonathan. 24/7. London: Verso, 2013: 40.

33. Ibid. 88

34. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: the redemption of physical reality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960: 302; 166.

35. Ibid. 310

36. Dyer, op. cit. 27

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, this 'island' is no paradise.

Now streaming on:

"The Island" runs 136 minutes, but that's not long for a double feature. The first half of Michael Bay's new film is a spare, creepy science fiction parable, and then it shifts into a high-tech action picture. Both halves work. Whether they work together is a good question. The more you like one, the less you may like the other. I liked them both, up to a point, but the movie seemed a little too much like surf & turf.

The first half takes place in a sterile futuristic environment where the inhabitants wear identical uniforms (white for the citizens, black for their supervisors). Big-screen TVs broadcast slogans and instructions, and about twice a day everybody gathers before them for the Lottery. This sealed world, its citizens believe, has been created to protect them from pollution that has poisoned the Earth. There is, however, one remaining "pathogen-free zone," which looks a lot like a TV commercial for " The Beach ." Winners of the Lottery get to go there.

Yeah, sure, we're thinking. But the citizens in the white suits don't think very deeply; "they're educated to the level of 15-year-olds," we're told. There was a time when that would have made them smarter than most of the people who ever lived, but in this future world education has continued to degrade, and we see adults reading aloud from Fun With Dick and Jane , a book that on first reading I found redundant and lacking in irony.

The true nature of this sealed world is not terrifically hard to guess; even those who failed to see through " The Village " may decode its secret. But the inhabitants are childlike and blissful, all except for a few troublesome characters like Lincoln Six Echo ( Ewan McGregor ), who wants bacon for breakfast but is given oatmeal. This inspires him to develop what all closed systems fear, a curiosity. "Why is Tuesday night always tofu night?" he asks his supervisor. "What is tofu? Why can't I have bacon? Why is everything white?" Then one day he sees a flying bug, where no bug should be, or fly.

Sidestepping some intervening spoilers, I can move on to the second half of the movie, in which Lincoln Six Echo and the equally naive Jordan Two Delta ( Scarlett Johansson ) escape from the sealed world, and are chased by train, plane, automobile, helicopter and hover-cycle in a series of special effects sequences that develop a breathless urgency. How the heroes manage to discover the underlying truth about their world while moving at such a velocity suggests they are quicker studies than we thought.

The movie never satisfactorily comes full circle, and while the climax satisfies the requirements of the second half of the story, it leaves a few questions unanswered. We wonder, for example, why a manufacturing enterprise so mammoth could have been undertaken in secret. Were government funds involved? We don't need to know the answers to these questions, it's true, but they would have allowed Bay (" Armageddon ") to do what the best science fiction does, and use the future as a way to critique the present. Does stem cell research ring a bell?

"The Island" has certain special effects, not its largest or most sensational, that reminded me of the creativity in a film like Spielberg's " Minority Report ." For example, little ladybug-like robots that crawl up your face and into your eye sockets, and transmit information from your brain before working their way through your plumbing and being expelled like kidney stones. I hate it when that happens. And consider the effective way CGI is used to show the actors interacting with themselves.

McGregor and Johansson do a good job of playing characters raised to be docile, obedient and not very bright. The way they have knowledge gradually thrust upon them is carefully modulated by Bay, so that we can see them losing their illusions almost in spite of themselves. Michael Clarke Duncan has only three or four scenes, but they're of central importance, and he brings true horror to them. Sean Bean has the Sean Bean role, as a smug corporate monster. And the beloved Steve Buscemi plays an important character who has brought all of his bad habits into the sterile future world.

Buscemi is an engineer, or maybe a janitor, and lives in what must be the boiler room. All closed systems, no matter how spotless and pristine, always have an area filled with rusty machinery, cigarette butts, oily rags, and a guy who reads dirty magazines and knows how everything really works. Even in " Downfall ," the harrowing drama about the last days of Hitler, there was a boiler room in the bunker where Eva Braun and her buddies could sneak away for a smoke. The Buscemi character turns out to be surprisingly well-informed and helpful, but then again, if the plot had to depend on characters educated only to the level of 15-year-olds, we might still be in the theater.

Footnote (spoiler warning). It was a little eerie, watching "The Island" only a month after reading Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Never Let Me Go . Both deal with the same subject: Raising human clones as a source for replacement parts. The creepy thing about the Ishiguro novel is that the characters understand and even accept their roles as "donors," while only gradually coming to understand their genetic origins. They aren't locked up but are free to move around; some of them drive cars. Why do they agree to the bargain society has made for them? The answer to that question, I think, suggests Ishiguro's message: The real world raises many of its citizens as spare parts; they are used as migratory workers, minimum-wage retail slaves, even suicide bombers. "The Island" doesn't go there, but then did you expect it would?

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

Now playing

A Bit of Light

Peyton robinson.

The Animal Kingdom

Monica castillo.

It's Only Life After All

Sheila o'malley.

Simon Abrams

Little Wing

Marya e. gates.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

Christy lemire, film credits.

The Island (2005)

Rated PG-13

136 minutes

Ewan McGregor as Lincoln Six Echo

Steve Buscemi as McCord

Michael Clarke Duncan as Starkweather

Ethan Phillip as Jones Three Echo

Djimon Hounsou as Albert Laurent

Sean Bean as Merrick

Max Baker as Carnes

Scarlett Johansson as Jordan Two Delta

Directed by

• Michael Bay
• Caspian Tredwell-Owen
• Alex Kurtzman
• Roberto Orci

Based on a story by

• Tredwell-Owen

Latest blog posts

Sonic the Hedgehog Franchise Moves to Streaming with Entertaining Knuckles

San Francisco Silent Film Festival Highlights Unearthed Treasures of Film History

Ebertfest Film Festival Over the Years

The 2024 Chicago Palestine Film Festival Highlights

• 162.815 movies
• 10.304 shows
• 30.070 seasons
• 616.565 actors
• 9.003.439 votes

• Best movies top 250
• Movie updates
• News Updates
• TV Shows updates
• Celebrity News
• Most Popular Celebrities
• Top 100 Celebrities
• Highest Net Worth Celebrities
• Celebrities born today
• On demand News
• Amazon Prime
• BBC iPlayer
• Paramount Plus
• Awards & Events News
• Sundance Film Festival
• Cannes Film Festival
• SXSW Film Festival
• Tribeca Film Festival

• Cast & crew

The Island (2005)

Genre: scifi / action, duration: 136 minuten, country: united states, directed by: michael bay, stars: ewan mcgregor , scarlett johansson and steve buscemi, imdb score: 6,8  (327.528), releasedate: 21 july 2005.

The Island plot

"Your time will come..." 2019. Lincoln Six-Echo (McGregor) is running for his life, a life he knows nothing about. The authorities of the high-security facility where he was kept for his safety had said that he would one day live in paradise, the last habitable spot on Earth. But everything they said was a lie. Together with Jordan Two-Delta (Johansson), they will have to run from their deadly pursuers in a totally unknown outside world. Afterwards they unravel a mysterious intrigue around a burning topical theme. "You have been chosen. The island awaits you."

Actors and actresses

Lincoln Six Echo / Tom Lincoln

Jordan Two Delta / Sarah Jordan

Albert Laurent

Dr. Bernard Merrick

James 'Mac' McCord

Starkweather Two Delta / Jamal Starkweather

Jones Three Echo

Gandu Three Echo

Community Announcer

Lima One Alpha

Trailer & other videos.

The Island (2005) - Dood

The Island (6/9) Movie CLIP - Jet Bike Chase (2005) HD

The Island (4/9) Movie CLIP - What Are We? (2005) HD

Reviews & comments.

• Opinion/Review

E-mail address

• 1529 messages

Een interessant gegeven dat goed is uitgewerkt. Het verhaal is niet allen actueel maar is ook emotioneel geladen. Je gaat echt meevoelen met die onschuldige klonen . Vooral in het eerste deel van de film, het tweede deel bevat voor mij teveel actie en plotseling worden de twee klonen rasechte actiehelden die van een hoog gebouw kunnen vallen zonder er ook maar een schrammetje aan over te houden . Scarlett Johansson ziet er erg aantrekkelijk uit en ze acteert ook heel goed. Ook Ewan McGregor (die ik eigenlijk alleen van Moulin Rouge kende -ja, mijn vriendin heeft mij doen kijken naar die film!) is ook best goed. Ik vind deze film een aanrader!

An interesting fact that has been worked out well. The story is not only topical but also emotionally charged. You're really going to sympathize with those innocent clones . Especially in the first part of the movie, the second part has too much action for me and suddenly the two clones become purebred action heroes who can fall from a tall building without leaving a scratch . Scarlett Johansson looks very attractive and she acts very well too. Also Ewan McGregor (who I really only knew from Moulin Rouge -yes, my girlfriend made me watch that movie!) is also quite good. I highly recommend this movie!

• 251 messages

Funny that they are now broadcasting this film again (Veronica) during this Corona debacle and additional rumors about Agenda 21. In the film you can find some elements regarding mind control, keeping people in isolation, scaring the unknown, contact restrictions, programming into 'ideal people', controlling thoughts etc....

And Scarlet Johansson just remains a nice thing, may I say that in this #Me Too era.

• 2070 messages

Lijkt wat op een modernere vertelling van 1984 van George Orwell, als ik eerlijk moet zijn. Het heeft er in ieder geval wel wat van weg. Leugens en bedrog om de mensen te doen gehoorzamen. Zeer actuele film toch wel en een beetje een verborgen parel. Ik denk dat ik zowat enkel nog Soldiers of Benghazi van Bay moet zien, maar ja dit is er eentje die toch wel wat apart is tov zijn andere films. Hier en daar wat spectaculaire actie maar de film heeft een zeer goed verhaal. Ook het einde is top. Een uitstekende film. Ewan McGreggor is stilaan 1 van mijn favoriete acteurs aan het worden. De chemie met Scarlett Johansson is ook sterk.

Sounds a bit like a more modern 1984 George Orwell tale, if I'm to be honest. In any case, it does have something to do with it. Lies and deceit to make people obey. Very current film and a bit of a hidden gem. I think I just need to see Soldiers of Benghazi by Bay, but this is one that is a bit different compared to his other films. Some spectacular action here and there but the film has a very good story. The ending is also great. An excellent movie. Ewan McGregor is slowly becoming one of my favorite actors. The chemistry with Scarlett Johansson is also strong.

Latest News

2024's biggest movies - Everything you need to know about Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F

It's Always Sunny in Philidelphia Streaming UK: How to watch

Mark Wahlberg confirms why he wasn't in Ocean's Eleven

WATCH: The terrifying new trailer for Speak No Evil starring James McAvoy

More to explore.

The Butterfly Effect

Scifi / Thriller, 2004

Le Vieux Fusil

War / Drama, 1975

War / Drama, 1959

A Night to Remember

History / Drama, 1958

V for Vendetta

Thriller / Action, 2005

The Illusionist

Mystery / Romance, 2006

Related keywords

clone transplantation love of one's life dystopia genetics freedom escape cloning false memory plague human cloning organ harvest 2010s

Trending Movies

• Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver
• Dune: Part Two
• Deadpool & Wolverine
• Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire - Part One
• Late Night with the Devil
• Dune: Part One

Trending Shows

• The Spiderwick Chronicles
• For All Mankind
• Baby Reindeer
• The Sympathizer

Corporate & Media

Realtimes | Publishing Network

• FootballTransfers.com
• FootballCritic.com
• FCUpdate.nl
• FighterFans.com
• MovieMeter.nl
• MovieMeter.com
• MusicMeter.nl
• BoekMeter.nl
• GamesMeter.nl
• WijWedden.net
• Kelderklasse
• Anfieldwatch
• MeeMetOranje.nl

About MovieMeter

MovieMeter aims to be the largest, most complete movie archive with reviews and rankings, in the World. Our team of journalists delivers the latest news for movies and TV shows. Click here to read more about us .

Social media

• MovieMeterReviews
• moviemeter__
• @MovieMeter_

Popular top lists

• Top 250 best movies of all time
• Top 250 best scifi movies of all time
• Top 250 best thriller movies of all time
• Top 250 best action movies of all time
• Top 100 best movies released in the last 3 years
• Top 50 best family movies of all time

© 2024 MovieMeter B.V.

Streaming in:

We checked for updates on 246 streaming services on April 20, 2024 at 4:07:30 AM. Something wrong? Let us know!

The Island streaming: where to watch online?

You can buy "The Island" on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play Movies, YouTube, Vudu, Microsoft Store as download or rent it on Amazon Video, Google Play Movies, YouTube, Apple TV, Vudu, Microsoft Store online.

David Nau leads a band of modern day pirates who raid yachts and sail boats of people on vacation in the Caribbean. When reporter Blair Maynard and his son arrive to investigate the mystery of the disappearing boats, Nau and his band of raiders decide to induct them into their tribe.

Videos: Trailers, Teasers, Featurettes

Production country

People who liked the island also liked.

Popular movies coming soon

Similar Movies you can watch for free

Report: Pawel Pawlikowski Attempting to Revive The Island Starring Joaquin Phoenix

By Anthony Nash

After being reportedly scrapped earlier this year, a new report from World of Reel suggests that director Pawel Pawlikowski is attempting to revive his film The Island .

What is the status of The Island?

The project — set to star Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara — was supposed to begin filming in May. However, the project was reportedly scrapped due to the film not being able to be insured. While it seemed officially done, World of Reel’s report notes that Pawlikowski “still very much wants this to be his next movie.”

Should Pawlikowski be able to get the project up and running again, the next tall task will be making sure Phoenix and Mara are available for it.

Phoenix specifically is set to star in Ari Aster’s next film Eddington, as well as an upcoming drama from director Todd Haynes. As for Mara, she’s set to star in The Kitchen next.

In The Island, Phoenix and Mara were set to portray an attractive American couple in the 1930s, “who escape to their own private paradise on a deserted island and live off the land,” reads the synopsis. “But after a millionaire passing by on his yacht turns the couple into a tabloid newspaper sensation, a self-styled countess appears with two lovers and plans to build a luxury hotel on the island. As battle lines are quickly drawn, psychological warfare ensues between the countess and the American couple as sexual infidelity, betrayal, and eventually, murder takes place among the island interlopers.”

Watch Billions Season 7 on Paramount+

At the time, The Island was set to be produced by Tanya Seghatchian, John Woodward, Mario Gianani, Lorenzo Gangarossa, and Ewa Puszczynska, with Reno Antoniades executive producing, and hailed from Apocalypso Pictures, Brightstar, Wildside, Vision Distribution, and Extreme Emotions.

Anthony Nash has been writing about games and the gaming industry for nearly a decade. When he’s not writing about games, he’s usually playing them. You can find him on Twitter talking about games or sports at @_anthonynash.

Share article

One Spoon of Chocolate Cast Adds Shameik Moore and Paris Jackson

Everything I Never Did: Mckenna Grace to Lead Teen Romance Drama

Deadpool & Wolverine Easter Egg Mocking Rob Liefeld Deemed an ‘Absolute Honor’

Marvel and dc.

Creature Commandos Update Given by James Gunn for First DCU Show

New X-Men Movie’s Story Synopsis Reportedly Revealed

Rumor: Avengers 5’s Release Date Might Not Be Delayed

Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara Will Reimburse You for Watching Hog Farming Doc

Napoleon Clip: Joaquin Phoenix Orchestrates a Brutal Icy Trap for His Enemies

Napoleon Video Highlights Joaquin Phoenix’s Authentic Performance

Eddington: Joaquin Phoenix and Ari Aster Seen Scouting for New Movie

Cast & Crew

Michael Caine

Blair Maynard

David Warner

John David Nau

Angela Punch-McGregor

Frank Middlemass

Don Henderson

• Average 4.8

Information

© 1980 Universal City Studios, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Accessibility

Copyright © 2024 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.

Internet Service Terms Apple TV & Privacy Cookie Policy Support

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Here's How the Yacht in the Overboard Remake Compares to Goldie Hawn's Original

By Elizabeth Quinn Brown

The film Overboard is about the haves and the have-nots—or, in this case, the haves and the have-yachts. The original 1987 film, which stars Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell , and the 2018 remake of the same name—which stars Eugenio Derbez and Anna Faris and was released just this month—feature childish yacht owners (Hawn and Derbez, respectively) who have amnesia and are, then, reestablished in less elite but comedic existences. For each of the Overboard films, ultra-luxe boats weren't only a crucial part of the setting—they were also key in demonstrating the characters’ status, and characters’ dedication to status symbols.

Goldie Hawn on the deck of her yacht in 1987's Overboard

In Overboard (1987), the 130-foot Yecats from Kong & Halvorsen in Glenorie, Australia (which was renamed the Attessa in 1992 and the Huntress in 1998), was featured as the S.S. Immaculata. (The same boat was also featured in 1993's Indecent Proposal, which stars Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore.) The interior decoration was characteristic of the era: The bold colors and excessive design complemented Hawn's character's profligate outfits. Brent Thomas, the production designer for Overboard (2018), describes: “There was definitely a campy vibe to it and it was incredibly ’80s, both in palette and in shapes and tones. It worked very well, but it was gauche and over the top and it assaulted your senses a little bit. We wanted to make our yacht in the remake a little more sophisticated and elegant and cleaner and crisper and more pristine and grounded, perhaps. A sort of sleek, smooth, gentleman’s fantasy but with elegance and taste as opposed to the one in the original.”

The yacht, renamed Birthday Present for the film, used for the 2018 remake of Overboard.

Thomas and his team chose the 164-foot Aspen Alternative for Derbez’s Birthday Present —a 2010 custom creation from Trinity Yachts in Gulfport, Mississippi, that he sourced from Saint Maarten in the Caribbean after a lengthy international search. (In case anyone gets a case of yacht envy, the Aspen Alternative is currently on the market for $18.9 million.) Thomas credits the boat’s aesthetic—its “old-world elegance” with exotic sapele-wood details—as the reason for the decision.

The closet Thomas designed as a nod to Goldie Hawn's in the original film.

The Aspen Alternative’s exteriors and main salon were featured in the film, but the interiors were constructed in Vancouver, Canada. In Overboard (1987), there’s a focus on the estate room’s closets, with Hawn exclaiming at one point, “Well, the entire civilized world knows that all closets are made of cedar!” (Cedar can be more costly and is often considered more prestigious, as it repels moths and moisture.) For this reason, Thomas says he introduced one in the remake, too: “As a little shout-out to Goldie’s closet, I gave Eugenio a fabulous walk-in closet. It looked like a Hugo Boss store with shelves of shirts and shoes. It was lit and beautifully laid out. Again, as a wink and a nod, we gave him a place for a bunch of shoes as well.”

A scene on the deck of 2018's Overboard.

Overboard (1987) contrasts with the remake, but it was the similarities between Hawn and Faris that were especially memorable for Thomas: “Every now and again, I went, ‘Oh my God, Anna looks and sounds just like Goldie!’ There was one moment with her lying back on the area in the bow of the boat. She said something like, “Boy, I could really get used to this lifestyle.’ It was a sunny day where you could lay back and relax, and it felt like the world was your oyster," remembers Thomas fondly. "I smiled and said, 'I get it. I could dig this lifestyle, too.'"

An interior set used for the yacht of 2018's Overboard.

Related: Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell Sell Their California Estate for $6.9 Million

Please use a modern browser to view this website. Some elements might not work as expected when using Internet Explorer.

• Landing Page
• Luxury Yacht Vacation Types
• Corporate Yacht Charter
• Tailor Made Vacations
• Luxury Exploration Vacations
• View All 3599
• Motor Yachts
• Sailing Yachts
• Classic Yachts
• Catamaran Yachts
• Filter By Destination
• More Filters
• Latest Reviews
• Charter Special Offers
• Destination Guides
• Inspiration & Features
• Mediterranean Charter Yachts
• France Charter Yachts
• Italy Charter Yachts
• Croatia Charter Yachts
• Greece Charter Yachts
• Turkey Charter Yachts
• Bahamas Charter Yachts
• Caribbean Charter Yachts
• Australia Charter Yachts
• Thailand Charter Yachts
• Dubai Charter Yachts
• Destination News
• New To Fleet
• Charter Fleet Updates
• Special Offers
• Industry News
• Yacht Shows
• Corporate Charter
• Finding a Yacht Broker
• Charter Preferences
• Questions & Answers
• Add my yacht

• Yacht Charter Fleet
• Fleet Updates News

Netflix’s Glass Onion Yacht: Take a closer look inside

• Share this on Facebook
• Share this on X
• Share via Email

By Steph Loseby   4 January 2023

The 45m (150ft) superyacht AQUARIUS has wowed audiences in her debut appearance on the thrilling murder mystery Netflix film, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery , which has already proven a huge hit after ranking number one on Netflix’s ‘top 10 Films in the UK today’.

A long-awaited sequel to the original Knives Out film that arrived in 2019, Glass Onion features more opulence and drama as Daniel Craig returns as Detective Benoit Blanc to solve a very layered murder mystery.

While the first  Knives Out  film was set in a very Cluedo-Esque manor house in Massachusetts, USA , the second movie heads to a house called the ‘Glass Onion’ on a private estate on a fictional Greek island called 'Pisceshite Island.' 

A number of scenes take place on board yacht AQUARIUS, the first being when the luxury motor yacht transports a group of friends to the lavish private estate of a tech billionaire, but when someone turns up dead, it appears that everyone on the island is hiding their own dark secrets, making each of them a threatening suspect. 

Glass Onion Yacht

Superyacht AQUARIUS - the real star of the show

Delivered in 2016, the Mengi Yay yacht AQUARIUS is the perfect charter platform for yachting vacations spent entertaining in style. Her generous deck spaces play host to a wide range of amenities including a luxurious full-beam beach club with a 3-way opening, an outdoor bar, a Jacuzzi and ample space for sun lounging and relaxing. 

Designed for waterfront living, the lavish yacht is home to some impressive leisure and entertainment facilities that make her the ideal charter yacht for socializing and entertaining with family and friends.

Luxury yacht Aquarius is the perfect charter platform for yachting vacations spent entertaining in style

Accommodating 10 guests across 5 beautifully decorated cabins, the yacht is extremely versatile for a variety of charter party configurations comprising a beautiful master suite with two private balconies on either side offering sweeping panoramic views and a further 3 double cabins and 1 twin cabin which are situated on the lower deck. The super yacht charter is also capable of carrying up to 9 crew onboard to ensure a seamless and high-end luxury yacht rental experience. 

How much does the Glass Onion yacht AQUARIUS cost to charter?

She currently has an asking price of €220,000 for a 7-day charter and cruises the Mediterranean all year round.

Glass Onion Location

A destination offering peace and tranquility like no other.

Glass Onion was filmed in Greece and Serbia, primarily on the luscious island of Spetses , a playground for Greek tycoons and the Global Elite. Oozing old-world glamor, nautical charm and scenic beauty, there is no doubt that this is one of the most exclusive charter regions in the Mediterranean.

Beautiful nature, perfect beaches and a complex history ‒ Spetses is an island that has all three.

Viewers will most likely want to know where the luxurious villa they see on their screens is located and they may even wonder if they can stay there themselves. The answer is yes. Filming for Miles’s luxurious villa took place on the nearby mainland at Villa 20 in the Amanzoe resort near the small town of Porto Heli and you can request to book and stay there this summer if you wish.

Amanzoe Resort

Live like the movie stars.

During production, the cast and crew of Glass Onion reportedly stayed at the Amanzoe resort where filming took place in the summer of 2021.

Luxurious, sophisticated and simply divine, the Amanzoe resort is described as a modern-day Acropolis from which 360-degree views encompass olive groves and the Aegean sea. Created by a team who worked hard and methodically to create a "world-class exclusive resort worthy of the incomparable beauty of Greece", it definitely stands out from the crowd. 

The masterpiece of Amanzoe’s villas is the Acropolis-inspired Villa 20, the perfect backdrop for a movie like Glass Onion

With the option to stay in luxurious cabanas, pavilions and exclusive villas, each offering private pools with stunning views and fragrant gardens, the resort caters to everyone's needs and wants. Home to a tranquil wellness center, a private beach and a distinctive beach club, which is a destination in itself, it is certain that guests will feel relaxed from the moment they arrive.

The Amanzoe is currently closed and will reopen for an exciting summer season on the 1st April 2023. Giving you a glimpse of the luxurious lifestyle, guests on a Mediterranean yacht charter can enjoy a night at this resort in one of the best 6-bedroom villas for around €13,500 per night in April while in the middle of summer that increases to €17,729 per night.

Yacht rentals in the Mediterranean

The Mediterranean abounds in outstandingly beautiful cruising grounds that the SuperyachtSet adores. Comprising perennial favorites such as the Balearics , Amalfi Coast and Greece, a private yacht charter here truly never disappoints. From serene anchorages to glittering cities fizzing with life, this destination has it all.

To find out more about chartering in the region, check out our Mediterranean yacht charter guide for more information, or check out our  ideas and tips for cruising in this summer hotspot  as well as our sample itineraries handpicked by experts with in-depth knowledge of the region.

Itineraries

If you’d like to learn more about chartering motor yacht AQUARIUS, please contact a recommended yacht charter broker .

Alternatively, if you are interested in renting a yacht that has appeared in a hit TV show or film, take a look at our article: Top yachts in TV and Film that you could charter today .

Top yachts in TV and Film that you could charter today

99m Canadian Vickers 1943 / 2020

60m Mondo Marine 2017

73m Admiral Yachts 2018

47m Delta Marine 2007 / 2019

95m Lurssen 2014

85m Lurssen 2013 / 2022

• READ MORE ABOUT:
• Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
• Yacht Aquarius
• Netflix Film
• Greece yacht charter
• Mediterranean yacht charter

RELATED STORIES

Previous Post

Explore the Bahamas onboard 55m superyacht charter LADY JJ

First look inside the 85m explorer yacht WANDERLUST

EDITOR'S PICK

Latest News

23 April 2024

22 April 2024

19 April 2024

• See All News

Yacht Reviews

• See All Reviews

Charter Yacht of the week

Join our newsletter

Useful yacht charter news, latest yachts and expert advice, sent out every fortnight.

Please enter a valid e-mail

Thanks for subscribing

Featured Luxury Yachts for Charter

This is a small selection of the global luxury yacht charter fleet, with 3599 motor yachts, sail yachts, explorer yachts and catamarans to choose from including superyachts and megayachts, the world is your oyster. Why search for your ideal yacht charter vacation anywhere else?

136m | Lurssen

from $4,272,000 p/week ♦︎

115m | Lurssen

from $2,771,000 p/week ♦︎

85m | Golden Yachts

from $959,000 p/week ♦︎

88m | Golden Yachts

from $1,172,000 p/week ♦︎

83m | Feadship

from $1,068,000 p/week ♦︎

93m | Feadship

from $1,492,000 p/week ♦︎

Maltese Falcon

88m | Perini Navi

from $490,000 p/week

122m | Lurssen

from $3,000,000 p/week

As Featured In

The YachtCharterFleet Difference

YachtCharterFleet makes it easy to find the yacht charter vacation that is right for you. We combine thousands of yacht listings with local destination information, sample itineraries and experiences to deliver the world's most comprehensive yacht charter website.

San Francisco

• Like us on Facebook
• Follow us on Twitter
• Follow us on Instagram
• Find us on LinkedIn
• Add My Yacht
• Affiliates & Partners

Popular Destinations & Events

• St Tropez Yacht Charter
• Monaco Yacht Charter
• St Barts Yacht Charter
• Greece Yacht Charter
• Mykonos Yacht Charter
• Caribbean Yacht Charter

Featured Charter Yachts

• Maltese Falcon Yacht Charter
• Wheels Yacht Charter
• Victorious Yacht Charter
• Andrea Yacht Charter
• Titania Yacht Charter
• Ahpo Yacht Charter

Receive our latest offers, trends and stories direct to your inbox.

Please enter a valid e-mail.

Thanks for subscribing.

Search for Yachts, Destinations, Events, News... everything related to Luxury Yachts for Charter.

Yachts in your shortlist

The 10 Best Movie and TV Adaptations of Treasure Island

L ong before Jack Sparrow was swigging rum on the Black Pearl or Peter Pan was duking it out with Captain Hook in Neverland, Robert Louis Stevenson had already effectively popularized pirate-based adventures on a massive scale with his 1883 novel Treasure Island . The book tells the tale of an innkeeper's son named Jim Hawkins, who joins in on an expedition for buried treasure aboard a schooner called the Hispaniola and finds himself pitted against a crew of deadly pirates led by the one-legged Long John Silver.

Stevenson's first major literary success (he would later go on to write Kidnapped and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ), Treasure Island has spawned adaptations across practically all types of visual media, but when the novel officially became public domain in 1944, it became an even more popular source of inspiration for movies and, later, television shows. While there have been a number of big- and small-screen adaptations of Treasure Island over the years, from faithful retellings to more loose interpretations, here we'll just focus on the 10 best of all time.

Treasure Island (1972)

In the 1972 version of Treasure Island , Orson Welles starred as the villainous Long John Silver alongside a cast of predominantly Austrian, Spanish, and Italian actors. The movie was based on a script that Welles wrote in the '60s, and while the Citizen Kane creator's intended vision never came to fruition, producer Harry Alan Towers, who collaborated with Welles during his radio days, decided to take the idea and run with it.

Welles showed his dissatisfaction with the project in classic Welles fashion: he constantly clashed with director John Hough, took the pseudonym "O.W. Jeeves" for his co-writing credit over problems with the rewrites, and claimed that his voice was dubbed in without his permission.

What Makes It Great

Despite the behind-the-scenes drama and the unforgiving reviews from critics, John Hough's Treasure Island is a guilty pleasure for many fans of Stevenson's novel. With a 3.1 Letterboxd rating (and, yes, a few of those are five stars), the film has a solid contingent of supporters, who praise Welles's controversial performance and consider the film to actually be one of the more faithful to the source material.

Stream on Tubi

The Treasure Planet (1982)

20 years before Disney's Treasure Planet made its theatrical debut, Bulgarian company Sofia Animation Studio came out with the first animated adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic called The Treasure Planet . Directed by Rumen Petkov, who later worked on a number of animated series, including Dexter's Laboratory and Johnny Bravo , the movie featured a couple of big names among its English-dubbing voice actors, including Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry and a young Bryan Cranston as the Jim Hawkins-based Felipe.

Featuring music from Bulgarian rock band Tangra and a fairly crude animation style, The Treasure Planet is definitely one of the least conventional Treasure Island adaptations. Still, its sci-fi surrealness developed a strong cult following. You can't find the movie on any major streaming services, but thankfully, a superfan uploaded the entire film on YouTube . Thank god for the internet!

Treasure Island (2012)

One of the most recent direct adaptations of the famous novel, the 2012 miniseries Treasure Island stars Eddie Izzard as Long John Silver and Elijah Wood as the marooned Ben Gunn. Directed by renowned music video director Steve Barron ( Billie Jean , Summer of '69 ), the movie was originally released in the United Kingdom on the now-discontinued Sky1 and re-released a year later on British channel Pick.

Barron's Treasure Island received mixed reviews due to its occasional departures from Stevenson's novel, though several critics and audience members were drawn to the film's somewhat realistic and less-Disneyfied depiction of pirates. Viewers also praised Izzard's engaging performance, as well as the acting of Wood, Toby Regbo (Jim Hawkins), and Donald Sutherland (Captain Flint). Treasure Island received two Primetime Emmy nominations for Outstanding Cinematography for a Miniseries or Movie and Outstanding Costumes for a Miniseries, Movie, or a Special.

Stream on Freevee

Related: Elijah Wood: His Best Roles Outside The Lord of the Rings

Treasure Island (1982)

Apparently, 1982 was a big year for Treasure Island adaptations, as Russian production company Lenfilm also came out with a live-action Treasure Island movie the same year as Bulgaria's animated film. The three-and-a-half-hour TV movie was directed by Vladimir Vorobyov, who not only starred in the film as pirate George Merry and did his own stunts, but also brought in his son Konstantin to play the supporting role of Dick Johnson, the youngest pirate in Long John Silver's crew.

Perhaps one of the least-known Treasure Island adaptations, the 1982 version enjoys a small, but strong, fan base. Many audience members have praised the film's more melancholy tone, while also being drawn to the music and the performances of the lead actors.

Treasure Island (1934)

Following the release of two silent Treasure Island films in 1918 and 1920, the 1934 version of Treasure Island was the first big-screen adaptation to feature sound. Directed by Victor Fleming (most known for his Gone with the Wind and Wizard of Oz adaptations in 1939), the film starred Academy Award winner Wallace Beery as Long John Silver, renowned child actor Jackie Cooper as Jim Hawkins, and Lionel Barrymore, Drew Barrymore 's great uncle, as the mysterious Billy Bones.

Filled with high-seas intrigue, action-packed sword fights, and an almost-whimsical atmosphere of adventure present throughout, Fleming's Treasure Island enjoys an important status as the first beloved adaptation of the classic pirate novel. Even nearly 100 years later, many point to it as being the best Treasure Island movie. While Cooper claimed in his autobiography that he didn't like his own performance and that Beery was difficult to work with, the performances of the two leads succeeded in drawing in most fans of the MGM picture.

Rent on Amazon

Treasure Island (1990)

Treasure island.

Release Date 1990-06-08

Director Fraser Clarke Heston

Cast Charlton Heston, Richard Johnson, Julian Glover, Christian Bale, Oliver Reed, Christopher Lee

Main Genre Action

Runtime 131

Aired by TNT, the 1990 version of Treasure Island starred Charlton Heston as Long John Silver and a 15-year-old Christian Bale as Jim Hawkins, while Oliver Reed, Christopher Lee, and Pete Postlethwaite were also featured in supporting roles. Interestingly enough, Fraser Clarke Heston (Charlton Heston's son) wrote, directed, and produced the film.

Considered to be the most accurate interpretation of Treasure Island , the Heston father-and-son collaboration featured dialogue directly from Stevenson's novel, and, even though it's still a kids' movie, it also included some of the more violent scenes from the book. Heston and Bale also boasted strong performances, and unlike Beery and Cooper, they maintained a strong friendship after the production, with Bale being one of the few high-profile celebrities to attend Heston's funeral in 2008.

Rent on Apple TV

Black Sails (2014-2017)

Black sails.

Release Date 2014-01-25

Cast Ray Stevenson, Toby Schmitz, Hannah New, Luke Arnold, Clara Paget, Jessica Parker Kennedy, Tom Hopper, Toby Stephens

Main Genre Adventure

Written as a Treasure Island prequel, Starz's Black Sails takes place 20 years before the events of the novel. The TV show was filmed in Cape Town, South Africa, and starred Toby Stephens as Captain Flint, Luke Arnold as Long John Silver, and Tom Hopper as Billy Bones. Real-life pirates from history, including Anne Bonny (Clara Paget) and Blackbeard (Ray Stevenson), were also featured in the series.

Co-creators Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine were committed to bringing as much detail as they could to Black Sails with 300 crew members being required to build just one ship. That dedication to creating an immersive experience ended up paying off, as the series won three Primetime Emmys -- two for Outstanding Sound Editing for a Series and one for Outstanding Special and Visual Effects in a Supporting Role. While it took about a season for the show to really take off, the dark and violent tone ended up being a big hit with viewers, creating a bingeable series that even non- Treasure Island fans could enjoy.

Buy on Apple TV

Treasure Planet (2002)

In Disney's Treasure Planet , the vessels are spaceships, the weapons are laser-based, and robots and anthropomorphic animals replace many of the original Treasure Island characters . The all-star cast of voice actors includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brian Murray, David Hyde Pierce, Martin Short, and Emma Thompson.

While Treasure Planet was actually the third science-fiction Treasure Island adaptation behind Bulgaria's 1982 animated film and the 1987 live action Italian miniseries Treasure Island in Outer Space, it is without a doubt the most popular and ambitious space-based retelling of the 19th-century adventure book.

Even though it earned $110 million at the box office, Treasure Planet was a box-office bomb, as its $140 million budget made it the most expensive traditionally animated film ever. Still, the steampunk-inspired flick became a cult classic, and its beautiful animation style and outside-the-box take on Treasure Island make it one of the most underrated Disney movies of all time . The movie received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature, losing out to Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away .

Stream on Disney+

Related: Treasure Planet: Why This Forgotten Disney Cult Classic Deserves a Modern Remake

Muppet Treasure Island (1996)

Muppet Treasure Island was the fifth theatrical Muppets film, with live-action actors Tim Curry and Kevin Bishop playing the key roles of Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins, while the remaining roles (save for Billy Connolly as pirate Billy Bones and Jennifer Saunders as innkeeper Sarah Bluveridge) were filled by Jim Henson's felt-covered creations. With exciting action scenes, classic Muppet-based comedy bits, and a score composed by the legendary Hans Zimmer , the movie was the second literary adaptation featuring The Muppets following the 1992 movie Muppet Christmas Carol .

Earning $34.3 million on a budget of $31 million, Muppet Treasure Island was a moderate box office success, though the movie boasts an extremely strong fan base that considers it to be among the best Muppet movies ever. Infused with charming musical numbers and a lighthearted tone that brings that distinctive Muppet sensibility to a familiar story, the film particularly shines thanks to the performances of Curry and Bishop (who received several young actor award nominations for his first movie role).

Treasure Island (1950)

Starring Robert Newton as Long John Silver and renowned child actor Bobby Driscoll as Jim Hawkins, the 1950 version of Treasure Island was Disney's first live-action film and the first big-screen adaptation of Stevenson's novel to be shot in color. The movie was such a success that it spawned a sequel ( Long John Silver ) and a television series ( The Adventures of Long John Silver ), with Newton reprising his role in both.

Filmed primarily in the United Kingdom, Treasure Island was the sixth most popular movie at the British box office in 1950, racking up a total gross of $4.1 million. Notable for its incredible set pieces and Newton's powerful performance (he is often credited for popularizing the arrr- and matey-filled "pirate speech" that is still emulated today), the film is widely considered to be the first tried-and-true pirate movie that spawned the creation of several high-seas adventure flicks, most notably the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Literary love affair: why Germany fell for a windswept corner of Ireland

Tourists have been descending on Achill ever since Heinrich Böll wrote effusively about its inhabitants’ customs and idiosyncrasies

I n 1954, the German writer Heinrich Böll landed in Ireland for the first time, headed west and kept going till he reached the Atlantic Ocean. He was seeking a refuge from the brash materialism of postwar Germany, and found it on Achill Island, where waves crashed against cliffs, sheep foraged in fields and villagers went about their business of fishing, farming and storytelling.

The following year he returned with his family and began to observe and chronicle the customs, idiosyncrasies, sorrows and joys of its inhabitants. So began a literary love affair between Germany and a windswept corner of County Mayo that endures 70 years after the Nobel laureate’s first visit.

Even today Germans comprise a significant proportion of visitors from continental Europe and several live on the island, drawn by a landscape evoked by Böll. Schoolchildren write essays about his account, which island bookshops stock in English and German. Ryanair connects Cologne, Böll’s home city , to Ireland West airport, also known as Knock, a 90-minute drive from Achill.

“The perception of Ireland in Germany and many other countries is still very much influenced by my father’s Irish diary,” said René Böll, the late writer’s son, who as a boy spent summers on Achill. The book’s loving descriptions of the people and landscape blend personal experiences with poetic exaggeration, creating something timeless, he said.

Böll’s 1957 book Irisches Tagebuch, or Irish Journal, was a publishing phenomenon that still captivates German readers and connects Achill to contemporary artists and writers. Diplomats, poets and film-makers will gather on the island from 3-5 May for an annual festival held in memory of Böll, who died in 1985 aged 67. The Böll family’s former cottage near the village of Dugort has become a retreat for artists , who rotate in and out every two weeks.

Fishing and farming have dwindled and wealth and holiday homes have replaced poverty and traditional cottages, but Achill remains Achill, said René, a photographer, artist and writer. “The warm hospitality is unchanged since the 1950s.”

Chris McCarthy, the manager of Achill Tourism, which partners with Mayo county council, said the landscape of Irish Journal was still the draw for German visitors. “We have walks and beaches and cliffs and mountains. That is what the German packages want; they want to see wilderness and sheep. Achill hasn’t developed in ways that other destinations have. We have managed to maintain our heritage and culture.”

Böll’s affection for the island seeped through the book but he did not conceal the grind of poverty or the heartache of emigration – nor the stubbornness of a local person who insisted that Adolf Hitler, as Britain’s enemy, did some good things, an encounter that the anti-Nazi writer likened to pulling teeth.

René has also explored a heartbreaking side of Achill – its cillíní, unconsecrated burial grounds of unbaptised and illegitimate children. He has found 25 on Achill and Currane peninsula, discoveries that he has channelled into his poetry and paintings. “The reactions were very moving in Ireland and in Germany,” he said. “Many were unaware of their existence.”

Some Dublin critics accused Böll Sr of conjuring a folksy vision of Ireland, but the depiction of island life was largely accurate, said John McHugh, a member of the Achill Heinrich Böll Association.

He said the impact of Böll’s book in Germany should not be exaggerated. “Irish people think Germans love Ireland, but most don’t know where it is. The minority that do are really interested – they love the Dubliners, the Pogues and Böll’s book.”

Most viewed

Woman Kidnapped on Oregon Doorbell Camera Found, Suspect Knew Her

Gigi Hadid's Hot Shots To Celebrate The B-day Babe ... Happy 29th!

Alec Baldwin Clashes With Anti-Israel Protester In NYC Coffee Shop

Guess Who This Future Star Turned Into!

Kellie Pickler Makes Emotional Return to the Stage After Husband's Death

Arnold schwarzenegger punked sylvester stallone into starring in movie flop, arnold schwarzenegger here's how i punked sly into starring in movie flop.

Arnold Schwarzenegger epically punked Sylvester Stallone into signing on for the most disastrous film of Sly's career, and that's exactly what Arnold wanted to happen!

Arnold and Sly sat down with Harvey for a candid, sometimes stunning convo about the intense rivalry between the 2 mega-action stars.

Sly was stunned as Arnold explained how he got his now-good friend to star in "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot." Arnold knew the script was terrible, but he had heard Sly was kinda interested in it. So Arnold figured if Sly felt he wanted the role, Sly would jump at it.

So Arnold called his agent, who in turn called Sly's agent to say A.S. was super interested in the script. Arnold then secretly called the director to express interest -- something Sly didn't know until now.

Well, short story kinda long, Sly jumped and took the role, and the movie was a disaster, which is exactly what Arnold wanted. And Sly isn't shy about saying he got played.

"TMZ Presents Arnold & Sly: Rivals, Friends, Icons" airs Tuesday at 8 PM/7 Central on FOX.

• Share on Facebook

related articles

Arnold Schwarzenegger Speculates Travis, Jason Kelce In L.A. For Movie Roles

Danny DeVito Planning New Original Movie With Arnold Schwarzenegger

Old news is old news be first.

Will the next Hollywood movie made in RI star Austin Butler? Some hope so.

PROVIDENCE – As the Hollywood picture "Ella McCay" winds down filming in Rhode Island , another production the state's Film & Television Office hopes will be made here is in its early stage.

Sony's 3000 Pictures studio is developing a movie starring Austin Butler and based on a crime novel by Rhode Islander Don Winslow, who set the story in Providence.

"It is our goal to bring that movie to Rhode Island," said Steven Feinberg, head of the state Film & Television Office , "and we will be a dog on a bone to work closely with Don Winslow to make that happen."

What's 'City on Fire' about, and why is it set in Rhode Island?

3000 Pictures hopes the project, the first in a trilogy, will become a star vehicle for Butler, who was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Elvis Presley in 2022's "Elvis," also starring Tom Hanks.

As reported by Deadline, the studio has secured screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes to adapt "City on Fire," which chronicles the battles between the Moretti and Murphy crime families. Kuritzkes wrote the script for "Challengers," starring Zendaya. Deadline called "City on Fire" a "high priority" for the studio.

Butler would portray Danny Ryan in "City on Fire," a retelling of the classic Greek tragedy "The Illiad" projected through the struggles of feuding Irish and Italian crime gangs. Winslow's sequels, "City of Dreams" and "City in Ruins," similarly retell "The Odyssey" and "The Aeneid."

In addition to starring in "City on Fire," Butler will produce the film, along with David Heyman, producer of "Barbie" and all eight "Harry Potter" films, and Shane Salerno.

Butler is currently starring with Timothée Chalmet and Zendaya in "Dune: Part Two."

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

A tenacious party girl fights to survive after three thieves commandeer her luxury yacht. Unable to escape and trapped on the yacht at high seas, she turns the tables on the intruders and ta... Read all A tenacious party girl fights to survive after three thieves commandeer her luxury yacht. Unable to escape and trapped on the yacht at high seas, she turns the tables on the intruders and takes matters into her own hands. A tenacious party girl fights to survive after three thieves commandeer her luxury yacht. Unable to escape and trapped on the yacht at high seas, she turns the tables on the intruders and takes matters into her own hands.

• Declan Whitebloom
• Patrick Schwarzenegger
• Frank Grillo
• 40 User reviews
• 9 Critic reviews

• Bella Denton

• Captain Lawson

• Arthur Denton

• Teenage Bella

• Young Bella

• Baby Face Sailor

• (as Michelle Colón)

• (as Teddy Polhemus)

• (uncredited)
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

• Goofs When the police boat arrives to board the yacht the quayside can be seen in the background, showing that the yacht isn't out at sea.

[last lines]

Jim : I'll kill her and then i'll kill you

Meeser : [blows him away] You shouldn't just tell people you're gonna kill them

User reviews 40

• Aug 8, 2022
• How long is Stowaway? Powered by Alexa
• August 5, 2022 (United States)
• United States
• The Yacht: La pasajera
• Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, USA (Marina and yacht location)
• Volition Media Partners
• New Legend Entertainment
• See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 34 minutes

Related news

Contribute to this page.

• See more gaps
• Learn more about contributing

More to explore

Recently viewed

Arraignment for suspect in deadly Swan Boat Club crash expected Tuesday

BERLIN TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WXYZ) — The arraignment for the 66-year-old woman accused of crashing into a birthday party at Swan Boat Club over the weekend, killing two children and injuring others, is expected to happen on Tuesday.

There's been no word yet on the time.

Community members have been stopping by the Swan Boat Club paying their respects to the victims of the crash.

A small memorial has been set up outside the building.

“We couldn’t believe it. We still can’t believe it,” said Ed Wenderski, a Berlin Township resident.

At around 3 p.m. on Saturday, tragedy struck at the Swan Boat Club in Berlin Township.

According to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, a 66-year-old woman who was intoxicated crashed her SUV into the side of a building.

VIDEO: Watch Monroe County Sheriff Troy Goodnough provide an update after the tragedy:

There was a child’s birthday party happening at the time of the crash.

At least 15 people were injured. An 8-year-old girl and her 5 year-old brother both died.

“Everybody’s sad. My wife was crying,” Wenderski said. “We just feel sorry for you, in our prayers.”

Wenderski lives down the street from the boat club.

He says his son’s pickup truck was hit on Saturday. He believes it was by the same driver who crashed into the boat club.

“I don’t know if you can see the tire tracks. His back tire was probably right here… We think it got pushed back by 12 feet,” Wenderski said.

VIDEO: Video shows the vehicle right before the deadly crash into the building:

I also spoke with another neighbor who was out with his young daughter as she was riding her bike.

He had this message for the victims’ family.

“Absolutely heartbreaking. It’s just a terrible tragedy. We are very sorry for your losses and you are in our thoughts and prayers,” Steve Cybulla of Berlin Township resident said.

The two siblings who were killed in the crash were students of Flat Rock Community Schools.

The district sent out a letter regarding the situation, here’s some of what it said.

It is with a heavy heart that I reach out to you today following the tragic events that unfolded yesterday. A senseless accident occurred where a drunk driver crashed into Swan Creek Boat Club, resulting in the loss of two siblings who were students in our school (Early Childhood Center, Bobcean Elementary) and severe injuries of a third sibling (Simpson Middle School). Our entire school community is reeling from this devastating news, and our hearts ache for the families and loved ones of those affected by this unimaginable tragedy. Words cannot adequately express the depth of our sorrow, nor can they ease the pain of those who are grieving. Please know that our thoughts and prayers are with every one of you during this incredibly difficult time. In times of tragedy, it is essential that we come together as a community to support one another. Now, more than ever, we must extend our compassion and solidarity to those who need it most. As we navigate through this challenging time, let us lean on each other for strength and comfort, and let us show kindness and understanding to all who are affected by this heartbreaking loss. When our students return to school on Monday, our counselors and social workers will be on hand to provide support and assistance to any students and families who may need it. We are committed to creating a safe and nurturing environment where everyone feels supported, heard, and valued as we begin the healing process together.

The suspect is currently being held at the Monroe County Jail.

The sheriff’s office is also investigating a local bar where the woman possibly may have been prior to the crash.

An attorney representing Verna's Tavern told 7 News that the suspect was at the establishment between 11 am and noon Saturday, more than hours before the deadly crash. He added that the woman's order was reportedly just over seven dollars and included a glass of wine and chili.

Attorney John McManus released the following statement on behalf of Verna's Tavern:

"We are saddened beyond words by the news of this horrible tragedy. Our most sincere thoughts and prayers go out to all those that lost their lives, their family members, witnesses and all of our Community that is in pain due to this incident. We ask for patience during the investigation and that the Justice system be allowed to work to uncover the actual facts surrounding the accident."

If you would like to help the family pay for funeral services, you can do so at the verified GoFundMe link here.

A GoFundMe has also been set up for on of the victims in the hospital. This page is also verified.

Sign up for the Morning Newsletter and receive up to date information.

Now signed up to receive the morning newsletter..

Make Your Voice Heard

Advertisement

Supported by

Cannes Festival Unveils 2024 Lineup, Including a Francis Ford Coppola Film

Organizers on Thursday announced a lineup that also features new films from Yorgos Lanthimos, David Cronenberg and Paul Schrader.

• Share full article

By Alex Marshall

Movies directed by Francis Ford Coppola, David Cronenberg and Yorgos Lanthimos will compete for the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the event’s organizers announced in a news conference on Thursday.

New films by Jacques Audiard, Paul Schrader and Andrea Arnold will also appear in competition at this year’s event, the festival’s 77th edition, which opens May 14 and runs through May 25.

The most eagerly anticipated film on the lineup is likely to be Coppola’s “Megalopolis” — the director’s first movie in over 10 years.

During Thursday’s news conference, Thierry Frémaux, Cannes’s artistic director, revealed little about that movie’s plot, but Coppola, the director of “The Godfather” trilogy and “Apocalypse Now,” has been talking about his desire to make it for decades. In 2001, Coppola told the The New York Times that “Megalopolis” was “about the future” and “a guy who wants to build a utopian society in the middle of Manhattan.”

Coppola, 85, has already won the Palme d’Or twice: in 1974 for “ The Conversation ,” and, in 1979, for “ Apocalypse Now ” (a prize that was shared with Volker Schlöndorff’s “The Tin Drum”).

The Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos will present “ Kinds of Kindness ,” starring Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe, who also worked together on Lanthimos’s most recent release, “ Poor Things .” David Cronenberg, the Canadian horror movie director, will premiere “The Shrouds,” about a widower who builds a machine to connect with the dead.

Among the other movies competing for the Palme d’Or are Audiard’s “Emilia Perez,” a musical crime comedy set in the world of Mexican drug cartels and starring Selena Gomez; Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice,” about Donald J. Trump’s early business career; and Andrea Arnold’s “Bird,” about a 12-year-old girl living in poverty in England.

The Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov will show “Limonov: The Ballad,” about a Russian poet living in New York, and Paolo Sorrentino, the Italian director, will be represented with “Parthenope,” which Frémaux said was about a beautiful woman who hopes to be known for something other than her looks.

Schrader, best known as the screenwriter behind “Taxi Driver,” will present “Oh Canada,” starring Uma Thurman and Richard Gere. Frémaux said the movie was a comedy about older people looking back on their lives and mistakes. Coralie Fargeat, best known as the director of “The Revenge,” will present a body horror — a gruesome horror movie subgenre — called “The Substance,” starring Demi Moore.

Before Thursday’s news conference, some movie critics had said they expected this year’s lineup to lack big movies from American studios because of the ongoing effects of last year’s Hollywood strikes. Frémaux said in the news conference that the 2024 selection “was not easy” because of the strikes, but that American cinema would “absolutely be present” at this year’s festival. Three of the 19 movies in competition are by American directors.

The details of a few high-profile movies appearing out of competition were already known long before Thursday’s news conference. Those include George Miller’s “ Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga ,” the latest installment in the action series; and Kevin Costner’s “ Horizon: an American Saga ,” set on the Western frontier during the American Civil War.

All of the entries will be scrutinized by a jury led by Greta Gerwig, the director and screenwriter behind “Barbie,” and it will announce the Palme d’Or winner at a ceremony on May 25.

At the festival’s closing ceremony, George Lucas, the creator of the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” series, will also receive an Honorary Palme d’Or for his contribution to cinema.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described George Lucas’s work on “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones.” He was a creator of the series but did not direct all of the films.

How we handle corrections

Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London. More about Alex Marshall

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

As “Sex and the City” became more widely available on Netflix, younger viewers have watched it with a critical eye . But its longtime millennial and Gen X fans can’t quit.

Hoa Xuande had only one Hollywood credit when he was chosen to lead “The Sympathizer,” the starry HBO adaptation of a prize-winning novel. He needed all the encouragement he could get .

Even before his new film “Civil War” was released, the writer-director Alex Garland faced controversy over his vision of a divided America  with Texas and California as allies.

Theda Hammel’s directorial debut, “Stress Positions,” a comedy about millennials weathering the early days of the pandemic , will ask audiences to return to a time that many people would rather forget.

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter  to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.