I loved this movie. The main reason is the title: At the moment, there's an adorable TV ad spot in South Africa that has a sock (read sock puppet) making its way all the way across land and sea - paddling by "foot" - 'til it gets to an island and finds all the other missing socks grooving on the beach! So now we know where the missing socks go! It's entered the realm of the Family Joke by now. I may regret this. . . La-la la-la la-la-la-laaa. . .

I honestly wish that the twist of the movie - that they're all clones and there is no island paradise to go to - had been kept quiet, so that the audience has the same horrifying moment of discovery. It would have made the movie that much better. Drat that movie guy! Ruined it for me. But it was still a very good movie. The sort that has you gripping the arms of the seats and biting your bottom lip with excitement.

The Background

The Facility is bland, boring and inevitably white. Down to the outfits and the gruel. It is populated by people with one aim: returning to the outside world in the form of The Island - a paradise repopulated by lottery, as the rest of the world was irretrievably damaged by the Contamination.

Of course it's all a myth: there is no Island, and the huge Facility is in fact underground. The "survivors" are clones, insurance policies who are "chosen" by lottery when their sponsors need new organs. It's all illegal, as the law prescribes that any tissue-clones be kept in a purely vegetative state until harvested. Unfortunately, clones kept in such a state inevitably fail, and their life-giving organs with them.

So there is a terrifying dichotomy between what the innocent clones believe and what the management of the Facility knows. There are the insurance policies, of course, and then the baby-breeders. The women who carry the foetus of their sponsors to term and are then killed. It's completely monstrous, but the head of the facility is a power-freak who only sees his ability to heal any form of sickness whatever the means.

The Plot

Lincoln Six-Echo is the first clone to question his environment and begin to show curious and defiant (ie human) behaviour. He has strange nightmares and then finds a live moth on one of his illicit explorations of the "contaminated" lower levels. So how did it survive the Contamination?

And so he and his "female product" companion Two-Delta start an escape attempt which leads the audience on a wild ride with more mayhem and insane crashes and pile-ups than Final Destination on acid. Fine mists of blood fly everywhere, considerably lowering the tone of the movie, which starts out as a futuristic suspense thriller and turns into Truck-Smash Extravaganza III.

Even so, it's the issues which are fascinating - and Steve Buscemi, of course, pop-eyed kindly weirdo that he is. No-one else accedes to be on the Simpsons and doesn't need caricaturing... I enjoyed the juxtaposition of clone versus "sponsor": who is in the right? Who "owns" whom? (when one is referring to the subject of a sentence, it's whom, not who. In case you're Ross or something.)

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