It starts off in a generically post-war boarding school setting, and it's apparent that since the biggest question that must be addressed is why the battery humans are so resigned to their fate, Ishiguro always intended the institutionalisation of that form of establishment to be a justification for their passivity. It still remains the biggest weakness of the set-up, though, when transferred to film: what can be accepted without question in the hermetically sealed universe of a novel, where suspension of disbelief is facilitated by an awareness that we're only seeing what the novelist as God allows us to see, becomes trickier to take in in the cinematic medium where it's difficult to treat a world that looks like reality as not functioning like reality. The same applies to a fudged justification of why a society breeding stock just for spare parts would really bother to educate any of them.
Of course, down the route of rebellion against their destiny lies the action and chase scene version, namely Michael Bay's The Island. It is preferable to that to comply with Romanek in taking a great deal of what transpires as metaphor for other forms of institutionalised oppression, even if a little more attention to suspense would not have gone amiss, with the film letting the cat out of the bag too early. The remainder is heart-rending and beautifully acted (barring Keira Knightley's stage-school turn, as usual), but also a drainingly sheep-like march towards the inevitable.
6/10
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