Shutter Island and Green Zone

March 14, 2010

Shutter Island and Green Zone

When the poll for this week’s film finished on Friday I was happy to see that the film I was hoping you would all pick came out on top. With 50% of the vote Shutter Island was the film I was going to see. However, not far behind was Green Zone so when Josh Halliday asked if he could write a guest blog reviewing this film I knew it was a good idea.

Shutter Island:

Shutter Island is not anything like I expected it would be, it’s not a one of those films you can love or hate but it’s definitely a film that will get you thinking. With so many twists and turns along the way, some people could say it was hard to follow.

As the film begins we are took to a boat where Teddy Daniels (Leonardo Dicaprio) meets his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo)  for the case he is about to work on. From the pair stepping onto the Island there is a feeling of something not being right and Teddy is determined to get to the bottom of the case involving missing ‘patient’  Rachel Solando. However, it seems that Teddy is also here to investigate something other than the case.

As the pair start to investigate they begin to realise the mess they’ve stumbled into. No-one will talk to them about missing patient Rachel- not the staff, patients and certainly not Doctor Crawley (Ben Kingsley) and as the case evolves, Teddy realises that something evil is going on on the island.

Teddy is now at breaking point and starts to hallucinate his wife (Rachel Williams) after taking ‘aspirin’ for a headache from the Doctor and his past experiences of WW2 begin to haunt him. I think that this is the point in the film where it would have lost quite a few people who were watching as it does tend to jump from reality to hallucination, which can be quite confusing.

Both Dicaprio and Ruffalo play excellent parts and their acting is outstanding, especially in the darker scenes of the film. I don’t think either actor would have realised how deep this film was going to be or how challenging the multi layer scenes would be until they began shooting.

I would definitely need to see this film again to try and understand certain parts of it which I’m still confused about now. Some of the questions which I had weren’t answered throughout the film and I think different people would have took different parts of the film in different ways. I wasn’t too sure about the ending which was kind of left to your imagination, which I think again would have confused a lot of people. When the film finished, everybody in the cinema sat in silence and I heard a man behind me say ‘ I feel like I’ve watched 4 films in one’. I think this confusion was the general feeling of everyone who left the cinema.

Overall the film was excellent, the acting was faultless and the scenery and camera work were superb, however I do think if you want to see a film where you don’t need to concentrate this is definitely not it!

Green Zone:

Green Zone is everything you would expect from a Greengrass/Damon shaky cam motion picture, set in the heart of bomb-ravaged Baghdad against a backdrop of contentious evidence in support of war.

It’s 2003 and, in the opening scenes, we’re led through the streets of Iraq’s capital, impoverished looters stalling Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller’s ( Matt Damon) ill-fated search for Saddam Hussein’s alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction.

From the outset, Miller’s sense of ‘something’s not quite right’ is pervasive. Miller is the man in charge of turning the dodgy ‘intel’ being passed down from anonymous Generals and secret meetings into Weapons of Mass Destruction-except the ‘intelligence’ is at odds with what is on the ground.

CIA boss Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson) is on the same page as Miller and the pair soon find themselves at odds with the rest of the US Army, the mavericks treading their own path in the hunt for WMD.

Green Zone is ultimately the full-tilt adrenaline rush underpinned by smart storytelling that Greengrass intends it to be. Matt Damon is more than convincing as Chief Warrant Officer and you would never know the soldier extras were real serving soldiers. It is a heavily politicised picture- though largely substantiated by verifiable fact- and one released on the doorstep of Sir John Chilcott’s Iraq Inquiry.

It will be interesting to see if Green Zone will ride the Box Office wave of Iraq-based Oscar winner The Hurt Locker, or whether the opaque run-up to war and its subsequent shooing under the carpet will be enough to keep the punters away.

By guest blogger Josh Halliday

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