Verdict
Summary
The Last Island is a feminist parable that I found difficult to accept in terms of being set in a realistic world. The characters are all cliché archetypes, and as the film goes along, of course the group is doomed to fail because the film set them up that way.
Plot:
A group of seven people survive a plane crash on a deserted island and struggle to survive together.
Review:
A passenger plane crashes on a deserted island somewhere, with only seven survivors. There are two women: One, an elderly lady (played by Patricia Hayes), and the other in the season of her youth and beauty, an independently minded woman named Joanna (Shelagh McLeod). The men are as follows: A militant religious zealot (Kenneth Colley) named Nick, a gay billionaire named Sean (Paul Freeman), another gay man named Frank (Mark Hembow), a gentle, celibate engineer named Pierre (Marc Berman), and a horny young buck named Jack (Ian Tracey) who would fuck a tree if it had a hole in it. The group gets along for the first few months, using their collective wits and skills to manage to forage for food and game in the jungle and to build a raft they hope will get them off the island, but after a spectacular failed attempt to leave, their morale plummets and they get the notion that the world beyond has undergone some kind of apocalypse (which is merely speculation). They despair and the men turn their eyes towards Joanna as the only hope for the human race to continue, and with Jack always on the verge of raping Joanna and the other men willing to let that happen, Joanna’s only real ally comes in the elderly woman who acts as virtually the sole voice of wisdom in the group. When a horrible, misguided incident sees Jack maimed and infected and dying, a rift divides the group when all the men decide to murder Jack by putting him out of his misery. The real villain emerges: the religious fanatic who has booby trapped the whole island and will commit murder (and does more than once) to keep his mind on a one-way track of delusional control by way of his fanaticism, which propels the group towards doom.
From filmmaker Marleen Gorris, the rarely seen The Last Island is a feminist parable that I found difficult to accept in terms of being set in a realistic world. The characters are all cliché archetypes, and as the film goes along, of course the group is doomed to fail because the film set them up that way. Two gay guys, an insane religious nut, a useless young straight guy, a celibate nice guy, a wise old lady, and only one fertile (attractive) woman in the bunch. They’re bound to lose! In a way, this movie was a little ahead of its time, (last year’s Triangle of Sadness is similar in some ways), and I appreciated it to a degree, but it just didn’t click on an organic, realistic fashion for me. There’s an audience for this rarity, but I’m not it.
Cult Epics restored the only existing 35mm English language print to HD, and the transfer was very crisp and grainy (which I like). It looked exactly like a nice print of a film at a repertoire screening, and the sound quality was great. There’s an audio intro by the producer, plus an audio commentary by a film scholar, a behind the scenes feature, an interview, a trailer, a photo gallery, and bonus trailers.
