Saw The Island this evening at the VUE cinema in Staines.

The story is classic sci-fi fayre, with an individual who questions his existence, questions the reality he is presented with and eventually discovers true reality and breaks free from the false reality. Actually I suppose this isn’t just confined to sci-fi, but is also the point of films like American Beauty as well as the more obvious The Matrix.

In this case, set in the not-so-distant future, the film opens with an individual who is part of a small band of survivors, who have found a safe abode after a global catastrophe leaves the rest of the earth uninhabitable. He begins to question his surroundings, indeed his whole existence. It turns out he is a genetic clone of a human being living in a perfectly habitable Los Angeles and has been bred for the sole purpose of spare parts.

This film raises all sorts of ethical questions about cloning. Would genetic clones be classed as human beings? What is it to be human? Would they have a soul?

The relevance of this fiction with the world around us today is stark, with cloning technology developing and raising these questions before anyone even thinks it through. Even more dismaying is that society justifies the killing of thousands of unborn human beings every year with the same arguments use to justify the killing of human beings in the film.

A film worth watching, with a good mix of explosions, crashes, guns and a spot of intelligent thought thrown in for good measure.