Shutter Island review

We watched the movie shutter island so we could try and evaluate it with a sociological outlook. The movie takes place on an abandon island, which once had a war fort on it that was converted and added onto to create a private in sane asylum. On this Island were many insane men and women. They all were considered violent and a danger to society so they were sent here to be helped.

The movie began with a ferry ride across the ocean to shutter island where Teddy Daniels, a United States Marshall, and his partner Chuck were coming to investigate the case of an escaped patient that was loose on the island. They got to the island and the head doctor got them situated in their rooms. Then the two marshals began their investigation by talking to some of the patients and staff members at the insane asylum. They were looking for a girl named Rachael Solondo. She was an escaped patient at the hospital and the two marshals were brought in to help search for this woman.

Rachael’s condition was of the worst case but it shocked the workers on the island that she would do so much as to try and escape the premises. So that is why they brought in the big dogs for this specific incident. The reason Rachael was brought into the hospital was because she drowned all of her kids in a lake. The reason she is considered clinically insane is because she has no recollection of it and swears that she would have never done such a thing.

So Teddy and Chuck continued their search for Rachael and they found some leads that eventually ended up with a dead end and they didn’t make sense. Throughout the movie though you may notice one thing, Teddy has many different flashbacks and continues getting headaches that he gets “aspirin” for from one of the doctors on the island. Eventually Teddy finds this strange and he decides to stop taking the pills and he begins to have more flashbacks that all eventually lead him to the lighthouse on the island where we find out the real truth about exactly what is going on, on Shutter Island.

When Teddy got to the lighthouse his eyes were opened to something nobody watching the movie saw coming at the time. He found out that he wasn’t just a United States marshal; he was much more than that. Teddy Daniels was actually Andrew Laeddis, the guy he thought burnt down his apartment building years ago. The woman named Rachael Solondo was actually his wife Dolores Chanel. If you pay close attention to these names they are the same letters just switched around into different names, seems like this is something that an insane person would do, that’s because Teddy Daniels was a patient at the hospital and he was the one living in his own little make believe world where he was still a marshal and he was still doing work for the nation he lived in when really he is the one that killed his wife Dolores. This all happened after he came to their lake cabin after a week of work where he found her outside next to the water on a swing and the three children face down in the water dead. He then remembered that he shot his wife because of what she had done to the kids.

The movie ends with a phrase that Andrew said to his partner (psychiatrist). The phrase stated, “Hey Chuck, this place has me wonderin, is it better to live a monster or die a hero?” this tipped off Chuck about the fact that even after remembering that Andrew had done these things he had pushed it out of his mind again and they were back to square one. So Andrew was then taken to be lobotomized by the doctors. There is one thing that Andrew did leave us to wonder about though. From what Andrew said to chuck did he really not know who he was and what he had done, or did he decide that it was better for him to only remember the good things and not the bad even if that was going to get him killed.