I admit it. I liked The Island.

The Island may have earned a disappointing $4ish million Friday and gotten mostly crapped on by critics, but I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say both are thoroughly undeserved. This is a good movie - consistently entertaining and even engrossing - and probably director Michael Bay's best (and definitely most restrained) to date, thanks in large part to the eclectically interesting cast (Ewan MacGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Sean Bean, Steve Buscemi, Djimon Hounsou, Ethan Phillips and Michael Clarke Duncan). It is certainly the best science-fiction film of the year so far (though nowhere near as brilliant as the forthcoming Serenity, which is the best film I've seen this year).

Granted, I generally like Michael Bay movies as stylishly fun escapist guilty pleasures (except for the astonishingly horrid Pearl Harbor, which I loathed), so there's that. But you don't have to take my word for it - check out Roger Ebert's three-star review ("The first half of Michael Bay's new film is a spare, creepy science fiction parable, and then it shifts into a high-tech action picture. Both halves work.") and A.O. Scott's positive review ("This lavish, exhaustingly kinetic film is smarter than you might expect, and at the same time dumber than it could be."). But it's nowhere near as dumb as Star Wars: Rots or War of the Worlds.

For more, check out the L.A. Times' fascinating behind-the-scenes article on the making of the film, USA Today's interview with Michael Bay, and Newsweek's amusing conversation between Bay and critic David Ansen (who, from his stupid first question, reveals he either didn't pay attention to the film, or is rather dense).