MAcroeconomia

"The Island" is one of the best science fiction movies I've seen in a long time. Aside from its obvious strengths, which include stunning action sequences thanks to director Michael Bay, "The Island" also explores important science fiction themes that are reflected in today's culture of corporate ethics, medical ethics, prison populations, organ transplantation, class warfare and others. The movie is based on the idea that, sometime in the near future, the wealthy citizens of the world might pay a private corporation to grow replacement body parts so that the clients might achieve immortality even as they destroy their own organs through unhealthy lifestyle choices such as reckless drinking, partying, drug use, smoking and consuming junk foods.

In "The Island," a private corporation is selling this organ-replacement service to wealthy clients, and telling them the organs are grown in a laboratory. But in reality, the corporation is cloning these wealthy clients and growing entire adult organisms -- human beings who have consciousness, intelligence, feelings, memories and creativity -- and then "harvesting" those humans when the replacement organs are needed by the paying clients.

To keep the clones controlled, they are told that they are the planet's only survivors of a global biological contamination disaster that makes it impossible for anyone to leave the cloning facility. When a paying client in the real world has a sudden need for a liver or other organs, the cloned human is told they've won the lottery and that they'll get to move to the only uncontaminated tropical island left on the earth, where they will enjoy a tropical paradise of prosperity. In reality, they are taken from the cloned human population, sedated, and then surgically stripped of their organs, which are delivered for transplantation to the paying client.

Not as far-fetched as it sounds

If it all sounds far-fetched, it actually isn't. There's talk today of not only growing human organs for precisely this purpose, there is also talk about using animals as hosts for human organs. There are plans to genetically modify pigs so that they can grow human hearts that could then be surgically taken out of the pig and implanted into wealthy customers who have the funds to pay for such a procedure. Pigs, of course, are mammals. Pigs have memories, emotions and families; they have life force and consciousness. They even have their own language and modes of expression. Pigs are living, breathing beings much like the cloned humans in this movie. Yet some modern medical scientists would treat them like the cloned humans are treated in the movie: As a "product" that can be killed and stripped of its organs at the command of a for-profit corporation that routinely placed profits before ethics.

In the movie, the cloned humans are treated worse than animals. They're actually treated like products. In fact, they are called product, not humans. When one of them escapes, the administrator of the facility finds himself in the awkward position of explaining to a group of bounty hunters that, "[his] product has escaped."

The script of "The Island" is insightful, as it explores the issue of corporate and medical ethics in one power-packed presentation. Would corporations cross these boundaries and use conscious beings as products in order to generate profits? If you know anything about corporations and the way they act today, the answer is undeniably "yes." They are doing so right now, in fact. Approximately forty percent of the U.S. population is now being used for medical experimentation by the prescription drug industry, where dangerous drugs with no long-term safety record are knowingly unleashed on the population in order to generate profits for Big Pharma corporations. Thus, the ethics demonstrated in "The Island" almost perfectly mirror the lack of virtuous principles practiced by free market corporations in the United States today. In fact, I don't find the corporate activity in this sci-fi thriller to be any different than what's actually happening in the real world right now.

Movie doctor parallels real-life MDs by thinking his misdeeds are for the "greater good"

Interestingly, the inventor of this cloning process and the head of the cloning facility (played by actor Sean Bean), believes he is doing a great service for humanity. He thinks he is a pioneering scientist who is acting within the guidelines of positive ethics and helping to extend the lives of patients. Yet his god complex blinds him to the ethical questions he has chosen to ignore in his effort to commercialize his pioneering technology.

This puts him squarely in the shoes of many medical researchers and scientists living in the real world, who routinely put their power, ego and profits ahead of fundamental principles of ethics. It leads the intelligent viewer to ask some important questions about modern medical ethics, such as: Should our nation's children be drugged on brain-altering narcotic chemicals? Should people be told that normal human behaviors are actually brain chemistry diseases that must be treated with patented chemicals? Should scientists be allowed to "play God" with the human body? When does consciousness begin and in what life forms is consciousness present? What is the definition of pain and suffering and, ultimately, what is the value of human life and the human experience?

"The Island" doesn't stop with these fascinating questions. It also explores other contentious themes such as prison labor. In the cloning facility, cloned humans are put to work, given simplistic jobs feeding amino acids into the food tubes that ultimately help generate new cloned human beings. They are told that they are manufacturing food for the cafeteria, but in reality, these slaves unknowingly perpetuate the system of enslavement by helping make more clones.

This mirrors what goes on in the prison system in the United States today. The United States is the world leader of imprisoning its own people, managing to incarcerate an alarming percentage of its population while simultaneously turning some of those prisoners into for-profit slave workers. This is what happens

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