Boring and pretentious

Rating: 1/10 (12 March 2010)

I usually have nothing against being influenced by a movie if it appeals to me and has a good story. Shutter Island did neither for me.
The music in the opening scene is trying way too hard to create an eerie feeling that Shutter Island is a place of evil. And the music reminded me of Cape Fear. But Shutter Island is far far from the greatness of Cape Fear which is Scorses all time masterpiece in my opinion. This however is his worst movie.
It is not DiCaprio's fault, but the horrible deeply flawed screenplay.
* SPOILER AHEAD * I would have liked to have Leo's character not been insane and developed an alternative reality in order to protect himself from the memory of his drowned children and the wife that he shot.
If the movie had been about him coming to find a missing patient and expose Ben Kingsley and the other doctors as vicious attackers of patients, then it had perhaps been a good movie.
Teddy's memories of WWII is also just boring and have no great importance to the plot. Yes I know that the dead girl in wagons represent his daughter that he could not save. But it's damn uninteresting.
The plot does not make much sense either. Leo is really a patient himself on Shutter Island, and to get him to accept his past, all physicians, psychiatrists, prison guards and patients are acting to support his idea of reality. How likely is it that doctors could get criminally insane to help in this way? It would not be feasible. They are all just as crazy as Teddy. If not more.
How likely is it that a German doctor could get Teddy to wake up when Teddy, because of his past as a soldier, hates Germans and basically sees him as a Nazi? They offer Teddy alcohol. It would probably just be tea they had given him had he said yes but he would probably have noticed it. And then what would they have done?
If the goal is to get Teddy to accept his past and that he is patient, why are the doctors then doing everything they can to act suspicious and untrustworthy?
What if Teddy had bolted when he was aboard the ferry with his partner/psychiatrist? It could not have been prevented.
How likely is it that the U.S. Marshalls are told to hand over their weapons when they are searching for a missing patient in a prison/institution for the criminally insane?
Teddy's gun is a toy gun. How likely is it that Teddy does not until the very end discovers that it is made of plastic, not metal and wood? Especially when he is suppose to be extremely intelligent.
On the whole, they let a seemingly very dangerous patient walk freely around the island for several days. They let him blow up a car and knock a guard out. They would never let it come so far in reality.
What is the meaning of it all? Why put the whole circus together due to one mental patient? Why feed on his delusions, if the goal is to make him accept his past? Why is he more interesting than all the other patients? Why don't they just talk to him and give him medicine that prevents him to invent an alternative reality? Yes it is 1954 and yes the time they knew not what we know today and yes they would probably give him a lobotomy as it is indicated they will at the end of the movie. But still.
There is so much that does not make sense in the movie and when it itself is so cliché-filled, I really can not take it seriously.