Nature Medicine | Spoonful of Medicine

Never Let Me Go and The Island: these films are anything but clones

Never-Let-Me-Go-Movie-Poster.jpgWe’ve already taken the steps towards growing hearts, livers, and ovaries in the lab, but that hasn’t stopped movie-makers from exploring the dark side of cloning. This month saw the release of “Never Let Me Go”, directed by Mark Romanek and based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. The movie chronicles the lives of Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Keira Knightly), and Tommy (Andrew Garfield), who grow up together at Hailsham, an English boarding school with a sinister secret.

* Spoiler Alert* Even if you haven’t read the book, you should be able to figure out that secret within the first five or ten minutes. It helps that Hailsham is an English boarding school, which has been synonymous with “creepy child farm” from Dickens to Pink Floyd. Anyway, all of the children are clones of people outside, and will ‘donate’ their organs (have them forcibly harvested) one at a time until they ‘complete’ (die).

It was hard as an audience member to be horrified at the premise, because the main characters seem much more concerned with their inevitable love triangle than, you know, the fact that they’re going to be killed for their organs. Perhaps they’ve had treatments to make them more tractable? We don’t really know. Why don’t they run away? We don’t really know. Does the subcutaneous wrist implant they use to swipe in and out of buildings explode if they don’t check in? I suppose providing answers to these very obvious questions would be too gauche for a serious art movie.


All in all, it’s a wistful sigh of a film, filled with significant glances and lingering shots (a finch perched on a teakettle, an old rusty boat moored in the sands of an English beach) to reassure you that this is a Serious Art Movie. The dialogue is sparse and cringe-inducing: “I had let unseen tides pull us apart”; “I was jealous because you had real love and I didn’t”.

But ultimately, the main reason that I dislike “Never Let Me Go” is that it does something that I would not have thought possible: make a Michael Bay movie seem steeped in realism.

Mr. Bay is currently occupied with digitally destroying the cities he didn’t wreck in Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen to make Transformers 3, but in 2005, he released “The Island”, another dystopian movie about people growing clones to harvest their organs.

When I say the movie is realistic, I mean that in a relative sense. Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson fall sixty stories and walk away with only slightly tousled hair. The main evil scientist explains that the evil biotechnology corporation doesn’t keep the clones in a persistent vegetative state because “human experience” was necessary for their organs to grow properly. People speak mostly just to narrate the action (“The building’s collapsing!”; “Look, there’s a door! We can go through there!”, etc.).

But the characters at least seem vaguely human. Watching Ewan McGregor complain peevishly about not getting any bacon for breakfast after his robotic urinal detects a sodium excess in his system was much more believable than any of the over-wrought romantic pantings in “Never Let Me Go”. And when McGregor finds out he is a clone created to provide a liver for a philandering luxury yacht designer with sexually-contracted viral hepatitis, his reaction is extremely plausible: he runs away.

Here’s the trailer for “Never Let Me Go”, which is already playing in the US and scheduled to be released in the UK in January 2011:

And here’s the trailer for “The Island”:

“Never Let Me Go” poster via Collider

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