The Island/Headscratchers

The Policy and the Island

• How does that work? Does the policy terminate when they make a claim, or do they make another clone then somehow re-introduce the new one without anyone noticing they're the same person as one who went to the island? I mean, it seems a bit odd to offer this service but say 'oh, you can only use it this one time', wouldn't someone get suspicious or something?
  • For that matter, how do they re-introduce the clones of the 'defective' line? Aren't a bunch of the clones that didn't get sent to the Island going to go 'Hey, you look exactly like my friend who went to the Island, what the hell?'
  • One possibility is that buyers have to pay a "renewal fee" for every time they use up an entire clone. In case they do pony up, all they have to do to make sure no one in the facility notices their return is to alter their appearance a bit "in utero" or afterwards. If they can genetically engineer them to mature quickly, then changing hair color and, I don't know, hiring a plastic surgeon to make a few changes to the face would do the trick. Failing that, the people in the facility don't have to be working on actual local time, the whole thing is almost a giant holodeck. They could reintroduce a clone into a "night shift" and minimize potential exposure even further.
  • "Let's face it, clones are rock stupid." If clones believe the story about the Island, they will believe anything, including that he had a twin brother/sister that was also dug out of the ruins. Or they could just keep the new clones in separate area.
  • Weren't there four towers in the complex? You could send one person to "the Island" from tower three and stick the next clone in the line into tower one. As long as you keep the populations of the towers separated, they'd never know.
    • The scenes of the towers in the ocean were fake, it was really buried under New Mexico, I think.
• If they create clones of the people with diseases, wouldn't they create clones with the same disease...
  • Well, I'd think that would only be true for diseases that are genetic to begin with, like sickle cell, in which case you wouldn't really be able to do anything about it. though if a genetic disease causes the failure of an organ, I suppose as long as the clone wasn't to that stage yet it should work.

The Future: Largely Impervious to Blunt Force Trauma

• There's a number of times pretty early on in the film when someone gets hit about the head with a heavy blunt object and responds as if they've got a bad headache rather than having just been assaulted. The items in question include a monkey wrench and a crowbar. Truly the future is a strange place when people can shrug that off with mild annoyance rather than, y'know, serious injury or death!

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• How can the clone start the car of the real Lincoln with his fingerprint? Even twins that have the exact same genome still have different fingerprints. The genetic fingerprint would be identical, but not the actual fingerprint.