Writers: Simon Boyes, Gregory Gieras
Directors: Sam Gorski, Nico Pueringer
Dark Island starts with a scared woman covered in blood running from something, it’s not clear what. But there is a large cloud of black smoke an we hear that “Test 48 did not go as planned”.
The story is that evil megacorp Altracorp has been testing bio-weapons on the island. Needless to say something has gone badly wrong. A small team is sent in to investigate and they discover that the weapon has escaped and become capable of infecting, taking control of and killing living matter.
It’s an interesting enough setup, but the implementation goes badly wrong.Putting aside the fact that it’s scientifically nonsense (I can live with that) the film suffers from an identity crisis. Is it a monster movie? A character piece showing how different people react under stress? Or an exercise in paranoia?
Dark Island tries to be all of these – possibly a result of having two directors and two writers along with three others with story credits! Unfortunately it does none of them very well.
It’s difficult to make black smoke scary, but they could have gone with subtle atmosphere instead – as it is the action scenes aren’t very effective. The characters aren’t very interesting and the few character flashbacks are out of place and just feel like filler, there’s nothing that couldn’t have been handled by a couple of lines of dialogue dropped in along the way. There is an element of ‘who’s lying to whom?’ but to be honest I really didn’t care.
Dark Island might have worked well if it had gone with a creepy ‘the whole island is the enemy’ approach. Or it could have simply used the bioweapon for a deeper and more subtle piece of character interaction concentrating on motivations and betrayal. But as it stands it’s just a confused mash up of styles and subgenres.