Intrigue

In 2019, a mercenary pursues a man and woman who escaped a research facility after learning their true fate.

Set in a dystopian future, a group of people work in a facility, essentially as slaves. They do have an incentive though - a regular lottery is held and one of them gets to leave the facility and its restrictions and move to The Island, a paradise. Lincoln Six Echo is one of the workers in the facility and he is infatuated with Jordan Two Delta. His life is fairly uneventful and mundane until Jordan Two Delta gets selected to go to The Island. Then Lincoln starts to discover the truth about the facility and The Island.—grantss

Futuristic thriller about a contained, seemingly utopian facility in the mid-21st century. The residents hope to be chosen to go to the Island - the last uncontaminated place on Earth, but when one inhabitant discovers that there are sinister forces at work, he and a female friend make a daring escape.—atwardy

No one knows where the last uncontaminated refuge on Earth is. What people do know, and dream of, is winning the lottery to have the chance to live in this unspoiled natural paradise. With the world ravaged by a deadly infection, Lincoln Six Echo and Jordan Two Delta, sheltered survivors of a high-tech subterranean community, can only hope to be among the lucky ones. However, it all sounds too good to be true. As nagging doubts and inexplicable nightmares plague Lincoln, a haunting question arises: Is a golden ticket to The Island a blessing or a curse?—Nick Riganas

Lincoln Six Echo is just like everyone else - he's waiting to go to the Island, the only place left in the world to actually live a life. It all sounds like paradise, but Lincoln Six Echo soon discovers that there's actually a sinister purpose going on at that facility and that he must escape - but not before stopping the sinister plan.

In July 2019, Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) lives in an isolated compound which strictly regulates its inhabitants' lives. There are hundreds of residents in the facility and all of them are very closely monitored via CCTV cameras and electronic implants in their bodies. This dystopian community is governed by a strict set of rules. The residents are told that the outside world has become too contaminated to support life with the exception of a pathogen-free island. Each week, one resident gets to leave the compound and live on the island by way of a lottery. Some residents have been at the compound for about 3 years and some for 7. Access to various sections of the compound is controlled by an arm band. This band also controls their diet and nutritional intake. Lincoln is friends Jordan Two Delta, a fellow resident at the compound.

Lincoln tells Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean), a scientist who runs the compound, of his discontent with the plain white clothes everyone is given and the strict social controls, including the fact that he is not allowed to have any bacon for breakfast. Concerned about strange dreams Lincoln experiences that involve a speedboat (which is named Renovatio) and other unfamiliar items, Merrick inserts probes into Lincoln's body to monitor his cerebral activities.

The residents are given a meaningless job to keep them busy, but nobody except Lincoln questions anything. New residents join the compound every once in a while, and are told that they are survivors from the real world. The new residents have no motor skills or language skills and have to be taught everything from scratch. Lincoln illicitly visits a power-plant basement where his friend, the technician James McCord (Steve Buscemi) works. While McCord is friends with Lincoln, but he is evasive about Lincoln's queries and tries to convince him that Lincoln has a sweet deal at the compound as he is special. Lincoln cannot understand why he is special.

Later, McCord goes to work and enters a room where fellow workers bring out a nearly adult human being from an incubation pod. Dr. Merrick inspects the newly "born" human and says that it is a fine product. The human is given an arm tag and moved into the compound. A sterile room has hundreds of such incubation pods with human beings inside them at various stages of development. Meanwhile, Lincoln tells Jordan Two Delta about the bug he found, and soon thereafter Jordan Two Delta is selected for the lottery.

Lincoln discovers a live moth in a ventilation shaft, leading him to deduce that the outside world is not contaminated. Lincoln captures and releases the moth and follows it to another section, where he witnesses two recent lottery winners being killed: one immediately after childbirth (for her baby, immediately after she had given birth), and the other (Michael Clarke Duncan) in the process of having his liver harvested.

Security discovers that Lincoln has wandered into unauthorized areas and start searching for him. As Lincoln rescues Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson), a friend who has just won the lottery, Dr. Merrick realizes that Lincoln is beginning to learn the truth.

While eluding security and escaping from the facility, Lincoln and Jordan learn that both the contamination of the outside world and the Island are myths, and that the residents are clones of wealthy sponsors, who intend to use them for organ harvesting or surrogate motherhood. Merrick's technology allows clones to incubate directly into adulthood. He tells sponsors and the government that the clones do not gain consciousness, but when Merrick hires French mercenary Albert Laurent (Djimon Hounsou) to kill or capture the escapees, he admits that the organs of unconscious clones inevitably fail, making them useless. Thus, he needs the clone's conscious in the compound.

Lincoln and Jordan escape the compound and find themselves in the Arizona desert. They find McCord, who explains that all the facility residents are clones of wealthy sponsors and are kept ignorant about the real world and conditioned to never question their environment or history.

McCord provides the name of Lincoln's sponsor, yacht designer Tom Lincoln, in Los Angeles and helps them to the Yucca Maglev station, where they board an Amtrak train to LA before mercenaries kill him. In New York City, Jordan's sponsor, supermodel Sarah Jordan, is comatose following a car crash and requires transplants from Jordan to survive.

Lincoln also meets Tom, who gives him some explanation about the cloning institute, causing Lincoln to realize that he has gained Tom's memories. Tom seemingly agrees to help Lincoln and Jordan reveal Merrick's crimes to the public, but secretly betrays them to Merrick and Laurent, as he desperately needs Lincoln's liver to survive his cirrhosis.

Tricking Lincoln into leaving with him, Tom brings him to an ambush that results in a car chase through suburban LA and ends with Lincoln tricking Laurent into believing Tom is the clone and killing him, allowing him to assume Tom's identity. Returning to Tom's home, Lincoln and Jordan give in to their romantic urges and have sex.

Merrick surmises that a cloning defect was responsible for Lincoln's memories and behavior, resulting in him and every future clone generation to question their environment and even tap into their sponsor's memories. To prevent this, he decides to eliminate the four latest generations of clones.

Lincoln and Jordan, however, plan to liberate the other clones. Posing as Tom, Lincoln returns to the compound to destroy the holographic projectors that conceal the outside world. Jordan allows herself to be caught to assist Lincoln's plan. Laurent, who has moral qualms about the clones' treatment after witnessing their fight for survival and learning that Sarah Jordan may not survive even with the organ transplants, helps Jordan.

Lincoln kills Merrick with a harpoon gun, and the clones are freed, seeing the outside world for the first time. As Laurent seemingly gives up his mercenary life, Lincoln and Jordan sail away in one of Tom's boats together toward an island, fulfilling their dream of one day going to such a place.