12 Terrible Movies That Blew Awesome Concepts

11. The Island

The Pitch

On paper, this Michael Bay-directed sci-fi thriller sounded like a glossy blockbuster stab at Logan's Run, following two people (Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson) who reside in an idyllic compound with the fellow survivors of a post-apocalyptic event, isolated from the contaminated wasteland outside.

Every week a lottery is conducted, allowing the winning resident to move to The Island, the only non-contaminated open-air location on Earth. But of course, it's simply too good to be true.

What Went Wrong

Bay's film certainly looks nice and does an initially solid job building up a compelling mystery, but it ultimately just feels like an inferior mash-up of basically every successful sci-fi property of the last few decades - especially Logan's Run, Blade Runner, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit 451 and The Matrix.

After the intriguing first act is done with, The Island increasingly relies on action tentpole tropes at the expense of actual thoughtful ideas, serving up monotonous action sequences that undermine anything genuine the movie might actually have to say.

It's certainly less offensive than Bay's worst entries into the Transformers franchise, but between the rampant product placement (Xbox Live!), bloated 136-minute run-time and pervasive feeling of soullessness, it's clear that Bay was totally the wrong filmmaker to handle such a potential-filled premise.