I realize that since Canada has virtually no chance of winning the Gold medal in men's Hockey, I should get back to blogging on scripts and shit.
Damn you Ryan Miller for being so good. C'mon for the sake of good sportsmanship, I have to hand it to the Americans this year, if they beat us, then it is simply because they have the better team, not the better players. But I digress...
Today I'm going to be reviewing an old draft of shutter island. I came across the script because I was curious about it. It doesn't seem like a normal Martin Scorcesse movie and that really got me intrigued. The guy that brought us such classics such as Goodfellas and Casino and Taxi Driver? Count me in.
The story begins in 1954 with Teddy, Leo's character, on his way to Shutter Island where the criminally insane resides. He's put together with a new partner Chuck who has just transferred from Seattle because of his interracial relationship with a Japanese woman.
Teddy and Chuck are brought in to investigate the case of a missing woman who somehow, despite stone walls and a never ending shift of patrolling guards, manages to escape the vicinity.
What can I say about the script? There's quite a few twists and turns in the story but none of them are the big HOLY SHIT moments, that is until the end. The trailer made the film look like Teddy and Chuck were somehow being trapped on the island and there were moments that made you question the character's sanity. But considering that the film is supposed to be a mystery/thriller, it didn't feel too mysterious to me, or thrilling.
The characters in the script are certainly well built. Teddy is still battling over his wife's death after all these years. Chuck's been transferred as Teddy's partner due to racial conflicts in his hometown. There is an intriguing premise that somehow, a patient managed to escape an inescapable cell, but it soon gets sidelined with Teddy finding the person who's responsible for his wife's death. That to me came a little too far out of left field for me to care. It's seems to be a too convenient coincidence that Teddy ends up investigating a case at the very same place that his wife's murderer ended up. Of course, when you step back and look at the script/film as a whole, this kind of thing is easily understandable.
It doesn't really feel like the script spends too much time unraveling the mystery that IS Shutter Island. No conspiracy, no sense of threat towards the main character's life, or at least the threat isn't established until far too late in the script. Once we get the idea that the island itself contains a conspiracy that takes patients and performs unethical tests on them, the story starts to really pick up pace. This is the time where we start to question Teddy's fragile mind. He's been hallucinating about his wife intermittently through the story. Flashes of images from his past bleed into his everyday life, is he simply a US Marshall with a checkered past or is there something else larger at play?
Little sense of mystery and suspense which in the case of a genre film like this, is a little bit of a disappointment. I wanted more of Teddy trying to unravel this mystery behind Shutter Island and not spend too much time on finding his wife's killer. It like kind of a derailment to me that he chooses to continue his journey in this way. But this is an adaptation of the novel and far be it from me to question the structure of something I haven't read, I'm going to assume that the source material is a much stronger piece than the screenplay. That's not to say that the script sucks, no siree. It's just the inevitable fact that many times an adaptation falls flat because something in the story's structure just doesn't lend itself well to the big screen or the author hasn't found the
What I loved about this script though is the description, very visual and a good place to learn for writing visually. This is one of the few scripts that I honestly say you can learn a lot about writing just through reading the descriptions alone. There's not much you can learn from story wise, it's pretty basic in it's structure and execution. But the writer certainly has a lot of skill with writing description. It's almost like a novel the way the language flows from the script. Many writers would elect to simply describe things as they seem them, nothing fancy. If rain is pouring, rain pours. But I loved description that the rain falls like "needles". It's not overly descriptive, packs a visual punch and what's important - YOU SEE IT.
One thing I hated though is again, I found out the ending to the story before I actually read it. I hate it when that happens but the fun part of it is when you start looking back in the script for evidence to support the "twist". Sometimes, I'm inpatient, sometimes I don't care, sometimes some cartoon asshole on tv ruins the biggest surprise to one of film's greatest twists because you weren't old enough to appreciate episode 5. This one was just me being stupid.
3.5/5
Read it for the description at least.
*Update, seems I was being pessimistic We Won GOLD!! Go Crosby!
