Parts: The Clonus Horror and The Island

What if you suddenly discovered that you’re a clone and that your purpose in life is to be killed so that your organs can be donated to your human counterpart whenever they need them so that they can live forever? Would you resist, run away, fight back? Would you try desperately to convince everyone that you have a soul and are capable of love and deserve to live? Or would you accept your fate as just the way things are? Or what if you never found out at all and believed that you’re headed off for a wonderful vacation as you head towards surgery?

What would the rest of society think of these clones—would they see them the same as farm animals being raised and harvested for their meat, or would they consider them empty vessels that walk and talk but have no souls, or would they only accept this system if they were told that the clones never suffer because they never achieve consciousness at all? How would the surgeries happen—would the clones go willingly or would they have to be fooled or would they be so thoroughly indoctrinated that they would accept their fates as part of the greater good?

Parts: The Clonus Horror and The Island

These two movies are essentially the same movie, with the creators of Parts later suing the studio that made The Island and winning a settlement from them for ripping them off. While Parts is a standard low-budget ‘70s dystopia sci-fi with a lot to say but not a lot of money to say it with, The Island has far more money than it does ideas. Parts really wants to disturb you and make you think. A large part of the third act is taken up by a debate between a powerful US senator and his philosophy professor brother about the ethics of cloning. With The Island, Michael Bay took this entire premise, its real world setting, several set pieces, and general character arcs, and added his trademark cynicism, sexism, homophobia, and over-stimulating, zip-zap-zoop, spinning, smoking, over-stimulating, exhausting Bayhem.

Attractive young clones spend their time exercising and hanging out while wearing either Adidas tracksuits in primary colors or white tracksuits and white Puma sneakers. They’re chosen to go to either America, “the land where good friends live and are always happy” or to go to The Island, which is the last remaining pathogen-free zone in the world. The clones get very basic educations and are micro-managed and generally treated like children. In The Island a clone wakes up from a nightmare and is told that his REM cycle was disturbed so he needs to go to the tranquility center; after he pees he’s told there’s too much sodium in his urine and he needs to change his diet. In Parts the clones are constantly surveilled by workers, who decide when they’re ready to have their organs harvested.

The main character clones in both movies follow Pop Culture Detective’s Born Sexy Yesterday trope, being very attractive and also very naive. They’ve been told throughout their lives that the outside world is unsafe and their job is to be “polite, pleasant, and peaceful.” They are drawn to each other despite workers watching them closely over monitors and giving them proximity warnings if they get too physically close. Whereas Parts is consistent with its theme that the clones are basically children and when they kiss it’s an innocent exploration of what feels good, The Island has the two clones have a full-on sex scene because why stick with a cohesive tone when you’ve got two attractive Hollywood actors to smash together on camera?

Both movies have horrific scenes of clones being prepped for the surgery that will kill them, but an interesting difference is who is shown being killed and harvested. The Island shows a pregnant woman giving birth and then, as she’s asking to hold her baby, a doctor injects a deadly drug into her IV. Down the hall, a clone played by Michael Clarke Duncan wakes up in the middle of surgery and brings the desperate, heartbreaking agony like only he can as he frantically runs for his life, screaming “I wanna go to The Island, you promised!” before he’s violently subdued and dragged away by the workers, who later watch footage of his attempted escape and laugh at him for running into someone. Parts, meanwhile, portrays a young white man as the victim. He trustingly drinks the orange juice handed to him by a nurse, then is excited to play the doctor’s game, which is to count backwards from 100. He goes unconscious but briefly wakes up to scream in terror inside of a clear bodybag as he’s frozen to death.

In Parts the male clone meets his original, a philosophy professor who is horrified to discover that his craven, egomaniacal senator brother cloned him without his knowledge. The two brothers argue over the merits of harvesting organs from clones “for the select few . . . a master race” and then reference Cain and Abel as they fight to the death. In The Island the male clone’s original explains that he had too much unprotected sex, contracted hepatitis, and bought a $5 million clone in order to get a liver transplant. Then the two clones engage in my favorite dumbass cliche, the “which one do I shoot” scenario, in which the guy with the gun is befuddled, shooting the real guy inspite of the fact that the clone has an obvious brand on his wrist. Michael Bay then unleashes the Bayhem until the movie mercilessly ends with a typical happy ending. Contrast that with Parts, which has an unintentionally hilarious scene of an innocent old couple being blown up in their house, followed by a real downer of an ending, which is always a ballsy move.

Neither movie is at all good, but Parts has a slight edge because inspite of its extremely low budget look and feel, it stays consistent with its tone and doesn’t assault your senses, your humor, and your basic decency like Michael Bay does with The Island.

There can be only one . . . Never Let Me Go.