Movie Review: The Island

Media Project
Dilemma, Stakeholders, and Perspectives
For the media project, I chose to examine the movie The Island. In The Island, the main dilemma is cloning, as the two main characters are clones of individuals that are wealthy. These rich individuals want clones for the purpose of organ harvesting, surrogate motherhood, and for other unethical reasons. However, the clones are unaware that they are clones, instead they live in an isolated compound and are lead to believe that the outside world is too contaminated to live in. So, they are kept in a compound, isolated from the real world without even knowing there is a real world. Other than the compound, clones are led to believe that the only other place not contaminated is an Island (hence the name of the movie), and people are chosen in a random “lottery” every week to be able to live on the Island. However, this other Island and “lottery” do not exist, as the people that are chosen are actually used for organ harvesting or the other reasons why the individual initially wanted the clone. Therefore, there are a variety of ethical dilemmas as cloning itself has been a hot topic in the past and present, as well as organ harvesting, surrogate motherhood, and even the fact that the clones were lied to and not told they were clones. They were also misled into believing that there is no outer world. The stakeholders in these dilemmas include the wealthy individuals who have paid for the clones, Dr. Merrick who is the scientist that runs the compound and is paid by the rich to harvest the clones, and then the clones themselves. All of these people are directly affected by the dilemma in different ways, as the rich people believe they have a right to do what they want with the clones as they paid to produce and take care of them. The scientist must do whatever the rich investors want him to do as they are the ones that are paying him to carry out the process of developing and taking care of the clones. However,