Shutter Island Review
Shutter Island is a film about an island with a mental institution called "Ashecliffe Hospital," which houses the criminally insane. This movie is directed by the accomplished hands of Martin Scorsese and stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, and Mark Ruffalo. This film is unique, and it requires a lot of digestion after the first watch. Even if the movie doesn't do the greatest job keeping you on track with the confusing story, the story is different in its right. The studio took some risks with this movie, with a few story elements left to interpretation, which some audiences might find unsatisfactory. I like how the movie is adapted from its book by Laeta Kalogridis and Steven Knight to suit an audience that we can assume at least possess some inferential and interpretive thinking skills, which is a big part of how the movie makes up for its flaws.
It is tough to go over the plot details of this movie without giving anything relevant away. So much of this film relies on its articulated plot details, and everything in this film is deliberate. The start of the movie is Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) with his U.S. Marshal partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) going to Shutter Island to investigate a case assigned to him. More and more supernatural things start to unfold on the island, and Teddy Daniels has to figure out what is going on. Anything else said would be giving the plot away. This movie has a great premise and has a few good things going for it. This movie mostly falters in the way it delivers the story to you. I feel like certain concepts in the story could have been introduced in a different order, or could have been added sooner. The reason I'm tiptoeing around the plot of the movie is that there is a huge plot twist out of nowhere at the end of the film, and the final shot before the credits leaves unanswered questions left for interpretation. The plot twist is really, superb because it is unexpected. This plot twist does bear flaws the more you think about it and makes the story even more confusing to piece together. This movie is great to dissect and think about, but I would be lying if I said that Shutter Island gets better with each watch.
I will give the film credit for being very engaging, and it handles the suspense well. There is also an abundance of weird dream sequences that were well done and didn't feel like a cheap narrative device. Like I said, this movie doesn't try to spell out everything for you, and it makes the most with its visuals to delve into Teddy Daniels' mind. There were a lot of interesting and obviously director-specific stylistic choices from Martin Scorsese that were fascinating to see, especially in the creepy dream sequences. There was a lot of restraint for the amount of special effects used in the appropriate applications, which is good to see in a genre which suffers a lot from that. There was not, however, a restraint shown for the music and the appropriate time to use it. The music was not an original score and was selected by Robbie Robertson. The music chosen suited the mood and the tone of the movie well and was a blend of bold, grand and haunting. The music is used in scenes that would otherwise be deemed as fine without it, like casual scenes, extreme wide shots and other scenes that made the music, or at least the particular music selected seem out of place. More held back and less in-your-face music would be subtle and add to the movie in these scenes, rather than be distracting.
After thinking about the plot twist at the end for awhile, I found that it was a little too far fetched. I still like the plot twist and enjoyed it, but there were events in the movie that didn't coincide and went against the logic of the plot twist. The final, ambiguous shot of the film pulls a double plot twist on you, so it's hard to know just exactly what to think of the story. [double plot twist - noun - 1. A plot twist and then another plot twist that directly invalidates the first plot twist's logic, meaning, reasoning and/or implications - 2. A plot twist and then another consecutive plot twist that reveals more information about the story and/or character/s that goes hand in hand with the first plot twist]. After pulling a double plot twist in this movie's case, it feels like a cheap way to go against the other plot twist's logic, where if something doesn't match up with one plot twist, the story can have an alternate one to use that makes sense according to that other plot twist's logic, and therefore is the seemingly correct one. Laeta Kalogridis (or whoever executed this in the movie), if you want to pull off two whole plot twists only five minutes apart from each other, you need to make sure the details in the movie supports both plot twists, not go against both to make one seem more right than the other. Also, to make the plot twist/s feel more genuine, the information given in exposition should have been more spread out over the course of the movie, and not have an overabundance of revealing all the necessary information in the last ten minutes of the film. There should have been more clues in the movie to make the plot twist make more sense by the end, where something confusing happens that is then revealed. It's hard to go over this in depth, but there weren't enough clues to make the plot twist as smart as it could have been. There should have been more moments in the movie to refer to that seemed out of place, for the sake of the plot twist being revealed. Instead, the reveal of the plot twist uses clues that no one would have ever been able to refer to since nothing out of the ordinary or weird was implied about these aspects of the story! The plot twist did catch me off guard, and added to my experience with the movie, but there was a lot of small details that could have been put into the film without that much hard work, besides some careful thinking, which could have made the plot twist's reveal feel less rushed.
Besides the story aspect of the film, the great colors, and camerawork, stylistic choices used and performances made this movie very entertaining to watch. I enjoyed Shutter Island for what it was, and this movie did a good job of at least engaging me in the story. The suspense was, again, done very well, and there were a lot of thrilling moments of this movie. After all the problems I discussed for this film, my biggest is that there isn't a whole lot of rewatchability to this film. I feel like I would watch it again for fun in around a year, or maybe even a couple months from now. The first time you watch this movie will no doubt be the most enjoyable. Watching this again, I could imagine picking up on a few more errors than I would have encountered for the first viewing, and feeling a little more dissatisfied.
+ Good suspense - Music used inappropriately at times
+ Very engaging - Some hiccups with the story arc
+ Good premise - Rare occasion where a movie needed more foreshadowing
+ Performances were great - Not much rewatchability
+ Unexpected plot twist
6.2/10
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