Are people that simple?

Rating: Null/10 (24 September 2010)

Question: which stayed longer in your neighborhood movie theatre, Shutter Island, or the half-empty popcorn container you left on the floor by your seat?
Let's start with the beginning of Shutter Island: two U.S. Marshals (DiCaprio and Ruffalo) head to shutter island, a prison for the criminally insane, to find an escaped patient. Hey, Ms. Kalogridis, why do you need two US Marshals to find an escaped prisoner on an island where there is no way on or off except by ferry? And the prison has control of the ferry? This is your setup? You're joking, right?
Ms. Kalogridis is not joking. She's dead serious. She thinks we're going to park our brains at the door and dig into her blunder. Are people that simple?
Come on, movie-goers, let's get real. Shutter Island is an insult to the intelligence of the viewer from beginning to end. Just because Martin Scorsese turned a blind eye to a poorly written, convoluted script with an ending that doesn't deliver, doesn't mean we should be lemmings and follow him off the cliff. Sorry, Marty, all that mood and dreariness and fog may set the tone and theme of the movie, but without a polished script, Shutter Island is a poor collaboration between director and screenwriter.
And do not confuse Shutter Island's ending with The Sixth Sense's ending. The Sixth Sense has an ending that delivers and works. Writer/director M. Night Shyamalan went back and proved to us that we saw what we wanted to see. Shyamalan didn't fool us. We fooled ourselves.
Kalogridis, on the other hand, serves up a gimmick ending that leaves us deflated and unfulfilled.
Shutter Island needed someone who understands adaptation. Clearly, Ms. Kalogridis does not. Sometimes adaptation means tossing away most of the story and creating a new original. There's nothing that says you can't use your imagination. Too bad Marty didn't encourage Kalogridis to use hers.