Thread: Shutter Island Ending WARNING contains SPOILERS

Okay so i just recently saw shutter island, and honestly i couldn't really understand the ending.
I'm fairly sure that there a 3 possible outcomes.

1. They tricked him into thinking that he was mental as the Rachel girl in the cave said, and through this kept the secret of the human testing from being revealed.



2. He really was mental, remembered what happened and the next day he pretended to be mental again so that they would take him to the light tower and erase his memory.

3. He was mental, remembered what happened and the next day went back to being mental unintentionally.

So what did you understand, and give reasons.

I think its option 2 (He really was mental, remembered what happened and the next day he pretended to be mental again so that they would take him to the light tower and erase his memory.), because when they first went to the island and were told to hand over the guns, the doctor/assistant struggled to get the gun out because he wasn't really a federal officer.

right after he said at the end : "which would be worse ? to live like as a monster or to die as a good man " his friend Chuck, calls him Teddy ( his actual name ), and not Andrew, as they suggested his name was...( patient name )... so i think the whole story was just like he suggested, to get him there... on the Shutter Island...

Well it looks as if we have a three way split gentlemen. I thought He was mental, remembered what happened and the next day went back to being mental unintentionally. If it was all really a trick to make him think he was mental what would have been the point.Surely they could just have taken him by force and lobotomized anyway rather than go through the the whole smokes and mirrors process. So I think that the doctors were telling the truth he was just mental.

if they would lobotomize him directly then the movie would be a very short one : " Paramount Pictures presents... Leo di Caprio as federal marshall Teddy Daniels" the scene where he is lobotomized and then the credits and the end...thx for watching...

-- but it could be another possible scenario : his partner is new..even we don't know why he's been assigned to work with Teddy, and not what happened with his previous partner... so this would be a big " ? "... at the begining he said, talking about his wife : " ... she died. There was a fire at the apartment building while i was at work... 4 people died ".. if we recollect the events later described he came from work, to find his wife just chillin' after drowning their 3 children, after which he "set her free" ( killed her ) just after he came back from work... 4 people died that day. So the whole story can be put on his mental breakdown from that day and we could say that blaming himself for their death got him to Shutter Island... creating thus an alternate reality...could be...

-- you could believe this, and i almost bought it, till the end, when ( just like i've said in my previous post ) dr. Sheenan ( also Chuck's character ) calls him Teddy and not Andrew... so, i ask you, why this sudden change of plot, if we already accepted him as a patient there?

-- and there is another aspect of this : his previous recollections of war and killing nazzis happened there in Dr.'s office... so was he indeed a soldier, and has been in that office, that place, that island before? or they are all just mixed memories combined with his imagination ?

-- and another thing : although his children died drowned, in his so-called visions of them ( at least the ones with the little girl and his wife ) they always die burned or in fire ( first when he remembers the fire at the apartment, and then when he blows up Dr.'s car )... so...?

I thought that he was Mental and just went along with what they told him toward the end to make them happy. But yes, my understanding of the movie was that he was mental

I'm going to have to go with option #2 as well. The line stated above "which would be worse ? to live like as a monster or to die as a good man " pretty much sums up that he remembered what he had done (so the "unorthodox treatment" worked), but that he would rather have his memory wiped than live with the guilt.

As a whole I was rather let down. Why can't a mystery just have a reveal at the end, why does modern cinema require the uber-twist? In fact, there was no shutter island at all, it was actually a...peninsula!

I think option 3, but perhaps that is because I read the book first and the book was more clear that option 3 was what had transpired. Here's a link to an article with Dennis Lehane (author of the book) discussing the movie's ending; specifically, the choice by the filmmakers to add the "live as monster, die as hero" line and the potential interpretation of that line: ‘Shutter Island’ Author Dennis Lehane Gives His Read On The Movie’s Ending » MTV Movies Blog

Note also that if he really fell into bucket #2, he would presumably not say that additional line as it would tend to indicate that he did realize he was Laeddis (the consciousness of his terrible acts) and therefore would not be a candidate for lobotomy.

yeah, there is not much doubt it's #3, not really debatable.

Well we can be sure that he was definitely insane. In talk with his friend George Noyce we can see that. George calls him Andrew and says to him that everything around him is just a play so from that we can see that all other doctors and people were just actors in play to cure his insanity.
And also, what's the chance of those 2 anagrams to be just a coincidence.
But there's other thing. He talked with real Rachel Sorando , the doctor in that cave. They told him it was just his hallucination but he slept over in that cave and next day he woke up, he saw here again so the question is can the hallucination last that long and be like that.
Also what could prove that he was sane is his vision of his dead children. That vision is a bit too morbid to be true. Let's be honest, who would drown his own 3 children in a lake and then just sit on the bench and nothing.

The only thing I don't get is that Teddy knew who killed his wife. That it was Andrew Laeddis and he even knew how he looked. He has a scar over left eye I think and even in one scene we can see Andrew. So how could you connect that with Teddy?