In his futuristic fugitive thriller “The Island,” director Michael Bay (“The Rock”) invites us to consider the age-old question: What does it mean to be human?

Anyone familiar with Bay's work probably already knows his answer: Racing fast cars, causing big explosions and hopping into the sack with really hot chicks. This is the director's essence in action, and while it leaves little room for a sensitive, insightful discussion on the topic of genetic cloning, “The Island” at least boasts a bit of provocative topicality to go with Bay's usual brand of hormonal, cranked-up mayhem.

The year is 2090, and the fitness craze has officially reached totalitarian extremes. Pushed to near-extinction by rampant pollution, the remnants of humanity huddle together in a super-sterile, super-automated campus governed by a benevolent nutritionist/dictator named Merrick (Sean Bean from “Patriot Games”) who oversees everything from the slices of bacon his wards get for breakfast to the sodium levels in their pee. It's like a 24-Hour Fitness reconceived by Nazi idea-man Albert Speer. Even the guards wear designer jumpsuits.

There's only one way out: By winning a lottery (thank you, Shirley Jackson) that entitles the lucky man or woman admittance to a tropical island sanctuary, the world's lone remaining “pathogen-free zone.”

Beset by hazy, violent dreams, an inquisitive young subject named Lincoln Echo Six (Ewan McGregor) suspects that something is amiss, and — of course — something is. In reality, this health-club-from-hell is a breeding ground for unwitting organ-donors who will be harvested and tossed aside like dirty syringes when their wealthy “sponsors” in the outside world fall ill. The “survivors” are actually clones; the “lottery,” a death-sentence.

With would-be sweetheart Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson, “Lost in Translation”) in tow, Lincoln finds a back-door escape route into the world at large, which — despite the 85-year interval — looks suspiciously like our present-day world, complete with gas-guzzling Cadillacs and plenty of delicious Aquafina water to slake everyone's futuristic thirst. Credit Bay (“Armageddon”) with creating a truly unique vision of the future: One informed almost entirely by product tie-ins.

Mere naifs to the outside world (they have no prior exposure to God, sex or money), Lincoln and Jordan make it to L.A. with the help of a clone-farm techie (Steve Buscemi). Chased by a bunch of amoral ex-Special Forces types (led by a glistening, glowering Djimon Hounsou), the duo tumble off skyscrapers, drag-race hover-bikes and leave a trail of twisted wreckage in attempting to find the human originals from whom they were copied.

It's “Logan's Run” on steroids, culminating in a frantic, thrillingly crumpled highway chase involving a fleet of sport utility vehicles and some errant locomotive axles.

Bay and screenwriter Alex Kurtzman borrow liberally from their sci-fi dystopian predecessors — there's an eyeball-abuse sequence reminiscent of Kubrick's “A Clockwork Orange” and memory-placement ideas swiped from Ridley Scott's “Blade Runner” — but miss that ever-elusive spark of authenticity. Our disbelief is seeded when we're asked to swallow the notion that a clone-breeding farm employing hundreds of civilians could somehow be kept secret from the public. Later, it springs to full bloom when Lincoln and Jordan sneak back into the clone-breeding facility to free their brethren.

Nor does “The Island” feel particularly germane to the current embryo cloning debate. When Bay shows us the image of a pregnant woman being euthanized after fulfilling her scientific function, it's clear we are seeing only the most grim, alarmist, Paul Verhoevenesque outcome of cloning technology. But that's just Bay, being human.