Shutter Island |  | Director: Martin Scorsese
Actors: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Rufalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, Max von Sydow
Studio: Paramount
Category: Movie
Buy New: $3.99
as of 9/10/2010 01:54 CDT details
In Stock
Seller: Amazon Video On Demand
Rating:  235 reviews
Genre: Thrillers
Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: Video On Demand
Running Time: 139 Minutes
ASIN: B003NTSBUG
Theatrical Release Date: February 19, 2010
Release Date: June 8, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Synopsis:
Academy Award winning director MARTIN SCORSESE once again teams up with LEONARDO DICAPRIO in this spine-chilling thriller that critics say "sizzles with so much suspense that it's hot to the touch."** When U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) arrives at the asylum for the criminally insane on Shutter Island, what starts as a routine investigation quickly takes a sinister turn. As the investigation unfolds and Teddy uncovers more shocking and terrifying truths about the island, he learns there are some places that never let you go. **Peter Travers, ROLLING STONE. |
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 235
 "Better to die as a hero or live as a monster?" June 13, 2010
Lostgirl
14 out of 14 found this review helpful
I think that some of the mixed things I'd heard about it come from the fact that some audiences were a) expecting something different and b) don't like to think. To be fair the studio mislead them by selling Shutter Island as a fun, edge of your seat, thrill ride. It's really a psychological drama disguised as a B grade horror movie. It indulges in all the gothic tropes: the isolated mental hospital, the hurricane that cuts everything off from civilization, hints of Nazi experiments, even the music plays into it. But really that's just the setting. If you take it as the whole thing, that's where you'll run into disappointment. It's more about what's happening in the mind of the main character- which is a puzzle in itself- than the big twist ending. I think that The Sixth Sense and others of it's ilk did a disservice to audiences in a sense. People look for the "trick" in movies, studios advertise the "big twist ending". But this isn't a movie about a twist. Yes, there's a big reveal in the end, and the "what" of the reveal is fairly obvious. It's the "how" and the "why" that we should be thinking about. These are the answers to the psychological puzzle of the film. People get so into the "what" after being groomed on twist endings that they forget there is a "how" and a "why". When the big reveal comes it's more about the catharsis, the coming full circle, the emotional confrontation, than the twist itself.
Yes, it can be confusing not to know whether the main character is dreaming or hallucinating, or really seeing what is. But with patience that becomes clear and the beautifully photographed, eerily haunting dream sequences are worth watching without trying to "figure them out". Just enjoy the performances (impressive across the board), the score, the cinematography, and go where the film takes you. Some might call the ending a cop out. But really it leaves audiences with even more questions: are there some things that are so painful that we're better off (literally) cutting them out of our brains? Is a delusional mind a prison or an escape? Who is sane? Is sanity a choice? In my opinion answering these questions would be the cop out!
Brilliant Monstrous tale April 11, 2010
Jacques COULARDEAU (OLLIERGUES France)
31 out of 39 found this review helpful
It is in many ways a great film. It questions the "heritage" of the Second World War and the horror the American soldiers discovered in the camps, in this case here Dachau. It is also more than clear on the passage of some of the researchers of Nazi Germany to the US to continue their research in peace, including if necessary with human experiments when dealing with medical research. It is unluckily well-known that prisons and orphanages were places of hellish torturing and violence in the name of research or reform. That's the first level of the film. The second level is: what can society do with the few human beings who are so bad that they can't be reformed? Various solutions are available: lobotomizing them to turn them into docile pets, pharmaceuticalizing their cases so that they become chemical zombies, or manipulating their minds to make them convinced of what they have done and of the necessary punishment called treatment they are receiving. The film goes even as far as imagining the production of human killing tools that could be used in wars. Surgery, drugs or mental manipulation, that's the choices envisaged here. The three of them are all just fully wrong. But the film is a lot more disquieting than that if we deal with the simple fact that the decision of a psychiatrist to classify you as anything psychic or psychological is absolutely irreversible and everything you may say or do to prove you are not will be turned into the evidence that you are and will be used against you. In other words the lady always protests too much. That's the Kafka aspect of the tale. But the film is even better than all that because Scorsese in his personal style builds a story in which we do not know at all at the end if the two cops were really what they pretended to be at the beginning and thus were kidnapped by the doctors to make sure nothing will seep out of their concentration camp, or if it is the doctors who are right at the end and that the two cops are what these doctors pretend, one is a killer and the other his doctor and that the whole tale was a medical procedure to reach treatment. At the end there is only one choice left: to live as a monster or to die in dignity. But what is dignity in such an environment? We are happily doubting everything at the end, which may create a feeling of frustration in the audience.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID
Enigmatically Powerful and Stunning May 30, 2010
gobirds2 (New England)
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
The film's visuals, dialogue, music and sound were stunning yet are characterized by offsetting subtleties that the overall effect is rather numbing yet thoroughly thought provoking. It has been several months since I saw this film in the theater but it still lingers with me. A very subtle yet powerful masterpiece from Martin Scorsese.
Bedlam near Boston: Psychodrama and Suspense on a Grand Scale June 7, 2010
Michael Jay Sullivan (Cambridge, Ma)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This eerie neo-noir, mystery, madness movie reminds me a bit of Scorsese's other foray into madness, "Taxi Driver." but the hallucinatory nature of Shutter Island is cinematically more interesting to me, although the DeNiro character may be slightly more powerful than DiCaprio.
Having worked for the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health as a psychologist in the 1970's, the authenticity of the settings is amazing (not surprising in that some of it was filmed at Medfield State Hospital where I worked). The brick exteriors and the institutional green interiors brought back some unsettling memories. Although this transpired in a more gloomy period of psychiatric history in the early 50's, where lobotomies were still in fashion and the applications of ECT (aka shock therapy) was almost equally as gruesome.
The delusional world of Teddy Daniels was quite convincing, and extremely well done. The concentration camp sequences, the visions of his wife, the psychiatrist in the cave- psychiatry was very primitive then gave an excellent representation of full blown paranoid schizophrenic. And DiCaprio pulled off this arduous scenario very well. Ben Kingsley was also well cast as the psychiatrist/superintendent, with his aristocratic airs and the pictures of the more grizzly bygone days of psychiatric torture adorning (e. g.screws in the head to let the demons out) his sumptuous abode. Seeing one of the finest actors of all time, Max Van Sydow, of Ingmar Bergman film's fame,as Kingsley's colleague was a real treat.
However, the idea that DiCaprio's law enforcement ordeals where part a vast psychotic psychodrama, initiated by Kingsley, seemed a bit nutty, and pushed the idea that cinema to be effective to the audience requires a "suspension of disbelief" to the limit. Nevertheless the mystery and suspense was excellent, and Scorsese came of looking like Bergman, orchestrating masterful shifts between fantasy and reality. Sure Martin overdid it a bit, on one hand, by having Shutter Island resemble a semi-gothic Alcatraz,and, on the other, having Shutter Island seem not nearly as scary on the inside as Bridgewater State hospital, the Massachusetts hospital for the criminally insane, memorialized in Joseph Wiseman's classic, and gruesome, documentary, "Titticut Follies." To reach that level would have required a character like Anthony Hopkins' chilling characterization as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, the gold standard of the criminally insane leading man. The criminally insane patients who, for the most part, seemed remarkably subdued, a symptom of the then new, chemical straight jacket, Thorazine.
Anyway I think the official Amazon reviewer who saw this as one of Scorsese's lesser works is crazy, or at least needs to get his head examined. I think this ranks up with "Taxi Driver" as one of Martin's finest movies. Also, I thought its portrayal of the Bostonian mindset was way better than in The Departed," in which DiCaprio was excellent but, as usual- like in last year's "Revolution Road," not fully appreciated. He won an Oscar as a young, developmentally challenged character, in the second rate "What's Eating Gilbert Grape," However, he will surely be passed over here because a "madman, who's frightening behavior,won't appeal to the pseudo liberal, PC, tastes ("Hurt Locker,"" Milk") of the Academy Award's self congratulatory, aesthetically challenged, voters. Maybe my somewhat scattered review is a bit delusional as well, like one the guard's said: "madness" is contagious in the madnouses, and I certainly did my time as a member of a front line treatment team in my own Shutter Island.
Masterpiece! June 18, 2010
Marie (United States)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Don't listen to the critics. If this movie appeals to you don't miss seeing it. The cinematograpy is beautiful and all the acting good. An island for the worst of the criminally insane and a mystery. What coud be better? Just a delicious movie.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 235
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