Needs to be viewed more than once

Rating: 5/10 (9 August 2010)

I won't call this one of Scorsese's best, but it is thought provoking and entertaining.
There were problems I found with this film. The visuals in the beginning, on the boat, looked very artificial. Was the intention to make it look cheap? There were quite a few bad edits and continuity errors, like when a character had something in their hand then didn't or their position changed in a jarring manner. I thought it might have been a side effect of the lead characters altered psyche, but on second viewing, they just look like mistakes.
Why did I enjoy this film? Well, it messes with your head. By the time you get to the end you don't know whether to believe Leo is Teddy Daniels or Andrew Laeddis. There are so many clues that point to either way, there's not really any actual reference point to use to show which persona is real. For instance, they don't give us much information on how Teddy arrived on the boat, let alone hooked up with a fake Marshall. Are we to believe there were people higher up in his office who put him on this case to trick him into getting trapped onto the island?
They don't explain what happens to the Deputy Warden character. Why was he the main character among the guards in the first half of the film, but then disappears as soon as the Warden arrives on the scene? Did he die? Was he on a ferry back to the mainland? He just vanishes into thin air.
I've read other people's reviews about this film and what is real and what isn't real, and what story should we believe. One person they always leave out is the real, Dr. Rachel who was in the cave. She wasn't a figment of his imagination. I think many of the flashbacks were slowly being put into his head to confuse his life story, but she wasn't part of that. Perhaps she's the clue that Scorsese wanted us to use as to who the real character was that Leo was playing?
It was interesting to note that Dr Rachel tells Teddy that the drugs take 36 to 48 hrs to make a patient more malleable. If you watch the movie, when he gets to the lighthouse, it's pretty much 2 days after he's arrived and been constantly drugged. That's when they put the suggestions into his head about his wife murdering his children, then he murdered his wife. But from my point of view, it's all lies. I believed it the first time I watched it, I'll admit. But second time, the brainwashing didn't work. :)
In the end, Teddy chooses to come back to earth knowing that they would end up killing him. His words he'd rather die good than live as a monster (making references to the doctors, including Ruffalo's Sheehan who he was talking to).