![]() ![]() But Kint, as it turns out in the movie’s finale, is Keyser Soze. Another wrongfully celebrated film is Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1999), which consists of a story told by a character named Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) about a gang of street crooks who are tricked and sabotaged by an uber-criminal named Keyser Soze. Scorsese is hardly the first to attempt a twist that renders his entire movie a waste of time. Unlike in The Wizard of Oz, there’s no thematic connection between these two roles, no substance to analyze. As a prominent example, Laeddis believes that Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) is his trusty detective partner, but in reality, this man is Lester Sheehan, Laeddis’ psychiatrist. He prefers Laeddis’ fantasies and delusions, which by contrast have no connection to the truth. But Scorsese doesn’t want us to know the big secret, so he spends relatively little time in the dreamscape. No wonder that she eventually concludes, “There’s no place like home”: her fantasized escape was barely different from her current, humble life.Īndrew Laeddis in Shutter Island also has dreams, and these dreams also gesture toward reality, faintly hinting at the darkness of his past. But, previously unrecognized by her, she truly loves the quirky and odd personalities that she lives with Kansas, so they, not exotic strangers, populate her dream. Thus, it’s fruitful to examine the connections between the dream characters and the originals: one might observe, for example, that Dorothy longs for a faraway escape (“Somewhere over the rainbow”) and accordingly dreams one up. As everyone knows, Dorothy Gale wakes up at the end of the movie: as the cliché goes, “it was all a dream.” But dreams aren’t random: they’re grounded in reality, and indeed, the colorful characters that Dorothy has dreamt appear to have been based on her actual family and acquaintances in Kansas. No meaningful analysis of these red herrings is possible, because they’re explicitly deployed by Laeddis’ psyche to be as misleading as possible-to have no traceability back to the truth.Ĭontrast this with the seminal twist ending of The Wizard of Oz (1939). Instead, Laeddis conjures up random red herrings designed to avert him from reality. Indeed it is a “contrivance,” because the fantasies of Andrew Laeddis that we observe over the course of Shutter Island are not in any way tied to the event that precipitated his madness: the murder of his children by his insane wife and his subsequent murdering of her. ![]() As the final revelations approach, the stakes diminish precipitously, and the sense that the whole movie has been a strained and pointless contrivance starts to take hold.” Scorsese in effect forces you to study the threads on the rug he is preparing, with lugubrious deliberateness, to pull out from under you. There’s no reason to re-watch Shutter Island, because now that we’ve seen its ending, we know we’ve been strung along by caring about the rest of it. The reason this is a terrible twist ending is that the revelation is a joke on us: we’ve wasted our time watching the body of the film. And indeed, it turns out that they’re all for naught. The narrative of the film is set up as a mystery, and Scorsese leads us to become highly invested in that mystery, which is: what shady dealings on Shutter Island have led to the disappearance of dangerous murderer Rachel Solando? Our protagonist Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DeCaprio) dives into this puzzle, collecting clues and opinions from various island residents-clues that involve, among other things: Nazi experimentation, governmental testing of nuclear weapons, and scary new psychotropic medications.īut as the runtime drags on, these various potential conspiracies don’t seem to be bringing us much closer to the solution. The core problem with Shutter Island is that almost the entire movie consists of irrelevant nonsense. For favorable contrast, I’ll intermittently refer to the films in the first group. But I don’t have much to examine-at least with any admiration-, because Shutter Island and the other two on the second list, in my view, are artistic failures. ![]() I can feel the huffing and puffing already, especially over the denigration of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, which is one of the most commonly requested movies I get for extended analysis, hence this essay. Below I present two groups of films: one group of famous twist endings that, in my opinion, deserve their acclaim and another group of twists that don’t. I do, too, but only if it’s done correctly. ![]()
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