Shutter Island

Last night we watched Shutter Island (we love Netflix instant play btw).  Still this morning I'm not sure if I liked it or not.  There were some times when it built suspense well, and the story wasn't bad though I knew what was going on half way through, but at times it just seemed to be a bit too strange and at times the story seemed to drag along a little.  Overall I think that it leans more towards the good than bad, but certainly not great.

***SPOILERS START HERE***

The Story started of with Leo DiCaprio's character (never been a big fan of him as an actor) and his new partner coming to an island to look for an escaped prisoner.  Upon arriving they met the warden, the psychologist, and a number of other characters that you see throughout the movie though none of them really end up all that memorable even in the end.

As the investigation gets going they begin to get some resistance from those that should be helping them and they begin to think that there is some sort of plot going on there that goes beyond a missing prisoner.  As the investigation continues Leo begins to have hallucinations of his late wife and has headaches as well. At this point with his hallucinations and his paranoia that something bigger is happening things start getting stranger and stranger.

At about the halfway point of the movie I turned to Lisa and said "you know, I bet he's psycho himself" and at that point I just hoped that we weren't seeing his mad ravings but all the while he's been tied down to a bed and nothing has actually happened.  Those kinds of movies annoy me because you can basically have anything happen and nothing matters because you've got the convenient escape of "but all the while he was actually detained and none of it was real".

Thankfully I was right but the things happening (other than the hallucinations) were actually happening.  Turns out that he was actually an inmate who had killed his wife after discovering that she had killed his kids and went crazy because he couldn't handle it.  The entirety of the events that took place turned out to be a huge "role-play" set up by the shrink there on the island to try to allow him to discover that his beliefs about the island were all false and that he was indeed a patient.

After a final confrontation with the docs it appeared as though it worked as he breaks through and admits to everything, thus avoiding a lobotomy, but the next morning his "partner" approaches him again and they see he has again regressed into his delusions.

Overall it wasn't a bad movie, had some good points and some bad, and it is worth watching if you are need of a movie one night and don't have a lot of options.