Weeks Too Late: Shutter Island

Shutter Island. Written by Laeta Kalogridis & directed by Martin Scorsese.

Preconceptions: I'm not going to lie to you, readers (well, I'm not going to lie to you about this). I am not a Martin Scorsese fan. Now, I did like Goodfellas, the new Cape Fear (Rise of the Fear) and to a lesser extent Casino. But I think most of his movies would really benefit from being axed down by at least thirty minutes. I'm sure the Departed would have been an excellent hour and a half movie. As it is, I'm pretty sure it's still playing on my DVD machine (Day 64: Further Betrayal Has Occurred).

While the idea of a movie about a scary insane asylum (basically Arkham Asylum on an Island) is pretty cool, I wasn't sure I wanted to sit through another 30 hour opus. Also: The trailers made it look like the asylum might be haunted and I thought it would be cool to see him do something supernatural.

General Review: So...I thought there were going to be ghosts in this. Or the hints of ghosts. I may be an idiot for thinking this and the rest of the world might have gone into this move expecting a completely natural thriller. Just in case I'm not the only Gullible Gwen out there: there aren't any ghosts.

Despite being completely lacking in ghosts, this is the best Scorsase film I've seen since getting out of High School. It may have suffered from being a bit too long, but only a bit. Mostly, I was content to let him lead me around by the nose for a couple of hours. I didn't feel like tons of the movie was rehash. Or, even worse, padding to make it too long to be a run of the mill genre film. That being said, there were a couple of plots running simultaneously with the main plot. In a lot of ways I felt like the WW2 one was a bit extraneous. The main character had enough going on without peppering this in.

I enjoyed the dream sequences (trust me, enjoying them is important since they make up a ton of the movie). However, they weren't particularly dreamlike. They were too lucid and linear for me to buy as actual dreams, but I liked them as movie dreams.

The setting was great. It was barren, isolated and generally craggy. I bought that our heroes have to fight against the island itself as well as the people on it. The asylum itself, as well as being a daunting set, had some neat bits that reminded me of Escher and Vertigo.

I didn't have any real opinion of Leonardo DiCaprio going into this. I've seen him do some neat stuff and I've seen him do some flat stuff (and I refuse to hold Titanic against him, there was simply no way I was going to enjoy that movie. It wasn't his fault.). His performance in this just continued this record. I was right impressed in some places and bored in others.

And I'm hardly an expert but there were definitely times where I thought the Boston accent should have been toned down a bit. As a West Coast Canadian (sor-ree) I honestly couldn't say if it was accurate or not, but when he put it on thick it was jarring as all get out (or oot). I'm a sucker for Ben Kingsley and refuse to be held accountable for judging him fairly.

I didn't go and see this with any die hard Scorsese fans, so I couldn't say what their reactions might be. But as just a regular movie goer, I dug it. Shutter Island was genuinely suspenseful and didn't give me time to start getting bored with the mystery.