Shutter Island

[GhostWolfe]

Has anyone else seen it?

I'm feeling the need for a bit of a "debrief", try and sort out my reactions to this film.

In short: I thought it was excellent. Not perfect, but... powerful. Emotionally like being hit by a speeding train.

/angell

[Dasboard]

Would love to hear something about it too. It looks pretty awesome.

Either way, I'm undecided about seeing it in the cinema or just getting the DvD when it comes out so some advice about it would be great.

[Izawwlgood]

I would give it a 7 out of 10.
High points: Phenomenal acting, even though I'm getting tired of Leo's Bostonian, he really did a phenomenal job. Good suspense, and fantastic music. Visually really great.
Low points: Completely predictable plot twist, that is double problematic for it's sheer unbelievability. Really, really good last line.

In the realm of 'Whatta twist!' films, this really didn't do so great. It was no Sixth Sense.

[GhostWolfe]

I felt really ripped off by the "twist". They did the big reveal and my gut reaction was oh, that's just cheating.

As far as the acting goes, it was amazing. I don't know about anyone else, but they really got in my head and started pulling on the strings. despite how badly the twist shunted me out of my suspension of disbelief, I walked out of the movie feeling physically ill because my head had been in such a tumultuous place.

I think I would recommend seeing it in the cinema, but I guess it's not necessary.

/angell

[somebody already took it]

I would give it a 7 out of 10.
High points: Phenomenal acting, even though I'm getting tired of Leo's Bostonian, he really did a phenomenal job. Good suspense, and fantastic music. Visually really great.
Low points: Completely predictable plot twist, that is double problematic for it's sheer unbelievability. Really, really good last line.

In the realm of 'Whatta twist!' films, this really didn't do so great. It was no Sixth Sense.

What was unbelievable about the twist?

[GhostWolfe]

I didn't see the twist as being unbelievable, but I think it was poorly set up. I don't feel like the set-up was really there. There were moments when you can see how certain scenes change in interpretation with knowledge of the twist, but it still felt too much like *wakes up* oh! it was just a dream after all!.

/angell

[Izawwlgood]

I would give it a 7 out of 10.
High points: Phenomenal acting, even though I'm getting tired of Leo's Bostonian, he really did a phenomenal job. Good suspense, and fantastic music. Visually really great.
Low points: Completely predictable plot twist, that is double problematic for it's sheer unbelievability. Really, really good last line.

In the realm of 'Whatta twist!' films, this really didn't do so great. It was no Sixth Sense.

What was unbelievable about the twist?

What GhostWolf said, mostly. It pretty much felt like moviemoviemoviemoviemovieJUSTKIDDINGTHEREWASSOMETHINGELSEGOINGONALLALONG!!! Instead of moviemoviemovie, are you starting to figure it out, huh, it seems like THIS has been going on the whole time, because of that thing I showed you earlier, that thing I showed you a bit later, and the final piece of the puzzle I'm surprising you with now.

Also,

Spoiler:

The notion of feeding into a paranoid schizophrenics delusions is the exactly opposite of how you deal with them. That the doctor would somehow come to the conclusion that the way to cure someone's fantasies was by letting him live them out is absurd, unethical, and unrealistic. Feeding the delusions of someone with his illness is going to make them worse, him more confused.

[CulturalSolipsism]

Have to disagree with some of the sentiment regarding the twist. I had pieced it together before it occurred (for the most part), but I feel it was set up fairly well and the majority of the film served as pretty good mind-screw material, if you're into that sort of thing.

Acting was excellent, to be expected.

[Izawwlgood]

It wasn't a mind fuck, it was just spooning you a clue here and there by saying "Look how eerie this is!", then at the end saying "Just kidding! It was THIS all along!"

Did you notice in the beginning as they walked through the gardens, that one of the criminally insane patients was holding a set of pruning shears? That another was holding a metal rake? Does that jive with ANYTHING you can think of regarding the criminally insane? Yeah. The majority of the plot development felt like that to me.

But yes, the acting was phenomenal, and the musical score built very intriguing tension and the cinematography was great.
I particularly loved the scene when;

Spoiler:

Ben Kingsly is revealing the 'twist', and DiCaprio grabs a gun and aims it at him. From DiCaprio's perspective, we see that he shoots him, we see blood spatter off Kingsley, and DiCaprio swings left, looking at (that other guy). He then pans back to Kingsley, and Kingsley is standing without a drop of blood on him. Snapping the toy gun in half, DiCaprio busts out his cosmic acting skills some more. It was a good hitting of the bottom of the rabbit hole.

[somebody already took it]

I would give it a 7 out of 10.
High points: Phenomenal acting, even though I'm getting tired of Leo's Bostonian, he really did a phenomenal job. Good suspense, and fantastic music. Visually really great.
Low points: Completely predictable plot twist, that is double problematic for it's sheer unbelievability. Really, really good last line.

In the realm of 'Whatta twist!' films, this really didn't do so great. It was no Sixth Sense.

What was unbelievable about the twist?

What GhostWolf said, mostly. It pretty much felt like moviemoviemoviemoviemovieJUSTKIDDINGTHEREWASSOMETHINGELSEGOINGONALLALONG!!! Instead of moviemoviemovie, are you starting to figure it out, huh, it seems like THIS has been going on the whole time, because of that thing I showed you earlier, that thing I showed you a bit later, and the final piece of the puzzle I'm surprising you with now.

If your objection is that the film didn't drop enough clues as to what the twist would be, what made you feel it was predictable?

Also,

Spoiler:

The notion of feeding into a paranoid schizophrenics delusions is the exactly opposite of how you deal with them. That the doctor would somehow come to the conclusion that the way to cure someone's fantasies was by letting him live them out is absurd, unethical, and unrealistic. Feeding the delusions of someone with his illness is going to make them worse, him more confused.

Was that the consensus of the medical community during the 1950s? Also, bare in mind that it was an

Spoiler:

experimental treatment. And that at some point lobotomy and electroshock therapy were also experimental treatments. As such, were they any less absurd, unethical, and unrealistic?

[Izawwlgood]

If your objection is that the film didn't drop enough clues as to what the twist would be, what made you feel it was predictable?

To borrow from Penny Arcade, I felt there were only two possible outcomes, spoilered because one of them was what happened:

Spoiler:

1) He's actually a patient in the hospital, or 2) There's a conspiracy involving the hospitals handling of patients. Oh wow, it was number 1.

I didn't feel the film 'didn't drop enough clues', I felt the clues were the opposite of subtle, and weren't there to facilitate your understanding of what's actually going on.

Was that the consensus of the medical community during the 1950s?

Good point, I'm not sure, I'll have to check into it. Was the consensus of the medical community pertaining to deranged psychotics to give them sharp items and let them roam around a garden? I know that electroshock therapy is still used in some cases, like extreme depression.

[GhostWolfe]

My problem with Shutter Island was not that it was predictable, or unsubtle, or whatever; but that I felt like it took a cheap shot at the audience.

At the end of the Sixth Sense, Bruce Willis' character was still the same character; all that hard work put into making him symathetic and believeable paid off because he was sympathetic, believable, and dead*. At the end of Shutter Island,

Spoiler:

Teddy was a non-entity, and I couldn't help but feel: "but I liked Teddy, I don't like this guy; I want Teddy back". I felt that Andrew wasn't ever developed as a character, he was just plucked out of the air, and the audience expected to accept him as a fully-fledged protagonist.

/angell

* If I just spoiled that for you, have you seriously been living under a rock for the last decade??

[infernovia]

I am going to find it impossible to talk about the movie without spoilers. Be warned. And any amount of actual discussion is going to involve the more intricate parts about it anyway. Then spoiler it. Here, I did it for you. - ST

Spoiler:

My rating for the movie is a 3/5 . It might become higher after multiple views.

What is Shutter Island? If you think it is any sort of horror, you will find it incredibly drab, bland, and all sorts of nonsense. That is because Shutter Island is not in the horror genre at all, it is about the psyche in a way that is only understood from that lens. It is a movie about a mental hospital, and not in the sense of a detective mystery but in the sense of a psychological (in the way that Silence of the Lambs was).

This is important, because if you imagine this movie like a detective movie, you will keep feeling disconnected. The presentation, the visual, the aural sense are all top notch, but you will soon feel that there seems to be a complete lack of pretension, direction, or any sort of understanding. There is just too much nonsense in the movie. It keeps bombarding you with all the big events from World War II, which feels forced at the same time as you know it is trying to make sense. And then, a twist. Out of nowhere! Not really. I think that was the portion of the movie that held my attention the longest. His shattering of the identity was done well, I thought.

I hold that the movie is actually a commentary about World War II. You can see this in his flashbacks of when he was a soldier, he is one of the people that came into the Nazi death camps. What is interesting is what he does within it, first he lets the director stay for an hour, bleeding on the floor. The other scene is when he is herding the Nazis away and one escapes. Then a shot fires, and everyone fires. And their bodies are left withering in the floors, reminiscent of the Jewish shootings. *flash* Wait, lets get back to the detective.

So, what is it about this that the director keeps drawing an analogy to? Teddy was an optimistic hero model created in the 1940s, before the war, as I am sure all of them were. And suddenly, through the process of the murder of the Nazis and his wife, he transforms into something evil, a monster perhaps equal or even greater than them. This is his realization. But he can't handle it, he separates it. So he still keeps the optimistic hero model done before his acts of evil... in an interesting parallel to the way that America did after the drop of the atomic bomb and the bombing of the civilians in both Japan and Germany.

This is the only place where Shutter Island could even become interesting, but I don't think it is a great commentary on it. It is worse than this article anyway, which explains it better:
http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudi ... amara.html

Edit: I don't really like the text filters here.

[novax6]

I posted this over at the review a movie thread already, but my thoughts:

In short, it sucked. I was looking forward to it, after hearing good things about it, and I was very disappointed. The acting and directing was very good, but the plot, jesus. Not only was it incredibly cliche and a tired plot, but the twist completely invalidates the rest of the movie. It's the equivalent of those terrible short stories where at the end it was all a dream. WTF did I just sit through 2 hours for then? It makes nothing that happened actually matter, and like others said, is completely unrealistic. Felt like a waste of time. I would have much preferred mind experiments and shady conspiracies. It really sucks DiCaprio and Scorsese went from The Departed to this.

[genderideals]

I liked it. I think DiCaprio is an excellent actor, despite the fact that he's beginning to resemble Jack Nicholson. Am I the only one who sees it? Please tell me I'm not.

I agree with what novax6 is saying here

Not only was it incredibly cliche and a tired plot, but the twist completely invalidates the rest of the motion picture film for theater and personal home viewing.

Yeah. I liked the movie a lot, but I'm never going to see it again. Movies with plot twists, especially ones like this don't hold up to repeat viewing. If I were to watch the movie again, I'm sure I'd find some parts of the plot that don't exactly mesh with the ending. I'm generally not the type of person to point out plotholes, but they'd probably be pretty obvious.

I realize the twist was kind of a cheap shot, but I still thought the movie was enjoyable. I think the acting and atmosphere saved it, because I can see how it would have seemed a bit... tired, maybe, without it.

Maybe I just liked this movie so much because

Spoiler:

after watching The Truman Show when I was about eight, I became slightly paranoid that my life was really just an elaborate "psychological roleplay" for a few months. Shutter Island reminded me of my childhood.

I didn't feel the film 'didn't drop enough clues', I felt the clues were the opposite of subtle, and weren't there to facilitate your understanding of what's actually going on.

Agreed. Looking back it seems like the twist should have been obvious, but I didn't really think it was. Maybe I'm not explaining myself properly, but I think the hints could have been more precise. It seemed like they were trying to explain some (erroneous) back story instead of hinting at what was actually happening. e.g. all the World War II flashbacks and the recurrence of his wife telling him to leave.

[infernovia]

I don't think you guys are looking at it right, although I think the film is the definition of indifference in enjoyability.

First of all, I thought that there were multiple instances where the visuals you were fed were too fantastical. Like the patio in the island, etc. I thought the erosion of the identity of Teddy was done very well, so much so that when he was confronted, my mind almost shut down. I felt just like Penny-Arcade did, that there were only two things going on, the island is either a place with horrible experiments OR he is the mental patient. I think they played around with this well enough (although the fantasy is too obviously fantastic for my taste, cutting down the enjoyability of the movie).

The World War II is the setting where it is supposed to make sense. I think if it tried to explain it, like I did in my previous post, it would just come off as mundane, banal, and forced.

[aldrich_lucas]

I felt really ripped off by the "twist". They did the big reveal and my gut reaction was oh, that's just cheating.

It pretty much felt like moviemoviemoviemoviemovieJUSTKIDDINGTHEREWASSOMETHINGELSEGOINGONALLALONG!!! Instead of moviemoviemovie, are you starting to figure it out, huh, it seems like THIS has been going on the whole time, because of that thing I showed you earlier, that thing I showed you a bit later, and the final piece of the puzzle I'm surprising you with now.

More or less agree. You didn't get any real chance to figure out what was really happening. Also agree with what novax6 said.

The acting though, was excellent and really pulled you into the film. The music I found to be on the corny side, especially

Spoiler:

at the beginning, when they're surveying the place and they are brought to the main facility from the boat. The loud dissonant notes were there to create tension but just seemed to . . . reiterate the point rather obviously that the place was all locked up and seemed quite redundant.

One thing:

Spoiler:

Assuming the doctor's view point to be real... You know how all this happened in two days? How he'd been imagining that this was all a conspiracy that had just happened for the past couple of days? What was he thinking and doing before that, for the last two years?

Also, the whole allowing an insane patient to run the place for a couple of days seems VERY far-fetched, imo.

[GhostWolfe]

If you think it is any sort of horror, you will find it incredibly drab, bland, and all sorts of nonsense. That is because Shutter Island is not in the horror genre at all, it is about the psyche in a way that is only understood from that lens.

The genre you're looking for is "thriller".

/angell