Did you like IDENTITY with John Cusack? How about STAY with Ewan McGreggor? How about this season of LOST which makes absolutely no sense and in fact contradicts tons of things from the first three seasons (which were actually good)? How about all those other sort-of detective movies where everything gets kind of surreal and you wonder what could be behind all this wild, cool stuff until the end where they explain it and...
Okay I won't ruin it (yet). Except to say that if you don't like those movies you probably won't like SHUTTER ISLAND and if you do then maybe you will.
The story: a us marshall, Teddy Daniels (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) go to an island that houses the most violent of the criminally insane to solve a mystery of a woman who went missing, apparently just walking through a wall and vanishing. Teddy has another reason to investigate the island -- he thinks the man who murdered his wife is there and he wants to find him. It's one of those movies where everything keeps twisting and changing, where each step leads to another mystery. Are they experimenting on the human mind for some kind of war experiment? Is there a government conspiracy? Were Teddy and Chuck lured there so they could be trapped on the island as inmates? What does this have to do with Teddy's weird visions of girls being drowned and of his time as a soldier in WW2 when he helped free the people at a concentration camp? And what about that hurricane that is hitting the island and threatening to drown everyone?
Now, since it's a mystery I'm not going to completely spoil it here, but I will say that this movie has the problem that a lot of similar movies have. The problem has to do with the concept of "mystery." Now, in writing mystery can be a very powerful force. Now in tv, you can strong people along for years (see: LOST). But in movies everything has to end and you have to either (1) explain what the heck is happening, or (2) just never explain it and hope you don't piss off your audience (ala CLOVERFIELD or MI:3). Now SHUTTER ISLAND does explain what is going on but it's the explanation that's the problem. You see, most of the movie is this build up of big, weird stuff -- conspiracy and medical experiments and weird visions -- and the explanation basically just pisses all that away. So you have this big build up of weird and cool and the answer is just so...blah.
And that's the problem with mystery. It turns out most people are better at building the mystery than in coming up with actual interesting, compelling solutions. So you have this big build up and the ending is...blah. As a rule of thumb, I'd think you would want the ending to be cool enough so that even if you started with it, people would still want to see the movie because the idea itself is so cool. Here, by the end I felt totally jipped. In fact, I wanted to go through the movie again just so I could count all the b.s. red herrings and all the scenes that didn't make sense and how it was just a lot of weird atmosphere and lame ending. But then I realized I'd have to watch the movie again and that really wasn't going to happen. Movies like this just piss me off.
PASS
If you want a good mystery/thriller: SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (but of course who hasn't seen that one by now?), DEAD OF WINTER, ANGEL HEART, NAME OF THE ROSE..yikes, there really aren't that many I can think of. Maybe that's why there are so many procedural tv shows?
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