Shutter Island Review - Movie Review w/ Spoilers!

For the first time in 2010, I was looking forward to seeing a movie with Mrs. Smith.  While the Book of Eli had my attention when it hit theaters, Shutter Island put together a more interesting story in the horror genre, which I simply could not resist.  When you add in the direction of Martin Scorsese, it appears to be a must watch film.  Did it hold up to my expectations?

The movie opens with Teddy Daniels (An FBI agent played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Teddy’s FBI partner played by Mark Ruffalo) sailing into Shutter Island, a prison housing the criminally insane during the 1950′s.  The reason that the FBI has been brought to the island is because one of the prisoners, Rachel Solando, is thought to have escaped.  According to the doctors at the facility, Solando was on the Island because she drowned her three children in a lake, but seems to believe that her children are still alive and that her fellow prisoners are just her neighbors and all kinds of delivery men. It’s Teddy and Chuck’s job to find out what happened, and more importantly to find Rachel.

Honestly speaking, I very much enjoyed how the movie went straight to the plot without having to set any back story.  So often in movies like this, the first 45+ minutes are wasted simply setting the scene, but Shutter Island takes care of that with quick flashbacks throughout.  So far … so good.

After arriving on the island, you are immediately introduced to the mastermind behind the island design, Dr. Cawley, played by the awesome Ben Kingsley.  You learn a little about the patient missing, a little about Dr. Cawley and most about what takes place on Shutter Island.  On the Island, three wards house different criminals – One for men, one for women and one for the “super crazies” (My defined term).  It’s now the job of Teddy and Chuck to investigate.  I bet you’re wondering at this point why these two FBI agents were sent out on an island nobody would ever dare visit.  Well that’s the subplot!  Teddy Daniels’s wife, Dolores, (Played by Michelle Williams) was killed in an apartment fire and the man who set the blaze, Andrew Laeddis, is housed in the crazy ward of Shutter Island.  You can bet that if Teddy finds him, he’s as good as dead.

From here on out you are taken on an elaborate quest to find both Rachel and Laeddis and it would appear that both FBI agents are free to travel about the prison as they like. Throughout his journey, Teddy Daniels learns that gruesome studies and operations are conducted on Shutter Island, specifically in the island’s lighthouse, and his goal no longer becomes finding the people he’s after but getting off the island before something happens to him.  Unfortunately, Daniels believes that his partner Chuck has been taken to the lighthouse, so he has no choice but to try to save him.  So if you’re following, the plot has completely changed from an FBI investigation, to a man on the path to revenge, to a torturous island, get me out of here movie.  It would seem that just when you have things figured out, this movie says “No, you think you’ve got it… but you really don’t”.

Before the end of the movie, I was a little disappointed with where the story had taken me.  The acting was absolutely fantastic but this movie was definitely lacking something.  When Teddy reaches the lighthouse to expose the Island for the anti-humanitarian that it has become, the last plot twist is thrown your way … it’s completely empty!  Well, not completely, at the top of the lighthouse Dr. Cawley is sitting at a little desk and waiting for Teddy .  Spooky!

What’s Dr. Cawley doing all alone you ask, well wouldn’t you know it, Teddy Daniels isn’t in fact an FBI agent on an investigation, he’s a patient at Shutter Island with multiple personalities whose real name is Andrew Laeddis! (Confused?)  A long flashback would confirm that Leo’s character had three children who were all drowned by his crazy wife (Sound Familiar?), thus causing “Andrew” to snap and shoot her.  For the past two years, Andrew’s primary doctor was Mark Ruffalo’s character and Dr. Cawley decided the only way to snap Andrew out of his delusion was to create the monster ruse.  Did it work?  Hell yea, you better believe anything Ben Kingsley does, he does well. So let me explain – Teddy Daniels, Rachel Solando and Chuck Aule are actually all characters that Andrew Laeddis made up  to help him deal with the tragedy that made him lose his mind. Believing that he is in fact Teddy Daniels and that Andrew Laeddis was responsible for his wife’s death, was all to escape the guilt that he was feeling himself. Funny enough, Andrew Laeddis was actually an FBI agent before he went coo-coo.

To complete the story, Andrew Laeddis doesn’t want to live with the burden of his dead family and pretends that Dr. Crawley’s experiment to retrieve him from the black hole in his mid has failed. He pretty much asks to be lobotomized.  The end has mercifully come upon us.

Ohhhh how I wonder what could have been.  With a director like Scorsese and a cast that includes DiCaprio and Kingsley, I was really pumped for this but it turned out to be a poorer version of the psychological thriller “Identity” (Which I love because it was original at the time).  The acting was truly the only thing that kept me from booing this movie during the credits and on the horror movie scale, I disappointingly give it 4 decapitations.