Friday, February 5, 2021

DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE!!!!! (Shutter Island review) - Zoey E. week 16

         Tonight, I watched the movie Shutter Island for the first time. Everyone has always told me I've needed to watch this movie, but somehow I never got around to it until now. I've always loved a good psychological thriller. My favorite movie in this category has always been Silence of the Lambs, however, Shutter Island is now competing for that first place title. I’ve heard from everyone that this movie is amazing, but when I searched the movie on Google, I saw that it only had 68% rotten tomatoes. By the end of the movie, I was both amazed and confused by the low score. 


I don't know if I've gotten better at recognizing literary devices, or if this movie, in particular, had a lot more of them, but I found myself pausing the movie every couple of minutes to tell my sister all about the symbolism in someone's dream, the juxtaposition of two characters, or the way that one scene parallels another. 



SPOILER ALERT: 

At the end of the movie, Teddy says something that really stuck with me:


Which would be worse: To live as a monster, or to die as a good man?


The weird thing is I don't really relate to this idea, but the movie was so good at capturing my attention and making me feel like I can relate to Teddy even though I’ve never experienced anything like what Teddy has gone through in his life. I feel like I can appreciate the irony of Teddy saying this as a reference to other people on the island when in reality, he is the one who it relates to!!!! Wow, I am getting chills just writing about this. 


It is definitely the type of movie that you have to watch a second time to really understand everything, so although I hate rewatching movies because I cant feel the same emotions that I felt the first time, I will be watching this again next weekend.


    
also I'm sorry but the title was clickbate... definitely go watch it!!!!!



UPDATE... 

**ANOTHER SPOILER** I already posted the blog but I totally forgot to write about how I LOOOOVVVEDDDD the unreliable narrator aspect of the movie.... the ENTIRE time we thought we could trust Teddy, and that everyone else on the island was plotting against him. In addition, it is the watcher's instinct to automatically trust the main character. So though I spent the entire movie trying to predict the movie's ending, I never could have predicted the actual ending. I don't know, maybe others were able to predict the ending, and that could be why the rotten tomatoes score is so low. Perhaps I'm just the perfect movie watcher because I go along for the ride of the movie instead of ruining it by guessing the ending. 
Image result for shutter island

2 comments:

  1. Wow - I'll definitely watch this movie. I've found that often times the rotten tomatoes score doesn't match up with how good the movie is, especially the score given by critics. The professional watchers are often pretentious and hyper critical.

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  2. While this isn't necessarily the case, one things to account for regarding the discrepancy between your experience and the movies reviews is that objective quality isn't always synchronous with personal enjoyment. I believe a piece of media can be objectively flawed in certain aspects, but still enjoyable to many people.

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