Laeta Kalogridis

Unfairly maligned. It's a bit overly glossy and shallow, to be sure, but compared to "Salvation", this is a solid, fun film. E. Clarke does a fine job as Sarah Connor (she even looks a bit like Hamilton) and the way the first film's continuity is revisited and revamped is almost Back to the Future-esque, in a good way. Some of the jokes land fairly well, J. K. Simmons is (as ever) fantastic, and Schwarzenegger gets to be funnier here than in any other Terminator film. Does it hold a candle to the original two? Heck, no. But it can probably stand shoulder to shoulder with the just-fine third one, and the main strike against it is simply all the loose ends it left hanging for the sequels they never got to make.… (mere)

This takes place in 1954. U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels and his new partner Chuck Aule travel to Shutter Island, the site of the Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane. They've been sent there to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Solando, a woman who ended up at Ashecliffe after drowning her three children.

Teddy has an additional goal: finding Andrew Laeddis, who he suspects is an unreported extra patient at the hospital. Laeddis was responsible for Teddy's wife's death in a fire, and although he swears to Chuck that he isn't planning to kill Laeddis if he can manage to find him, it seems doubtful that he's telling the truth.

Various details, as well as the somewhat "off" behavior of several of the hospital staff and patients, lead Teddy to believe that the head of the hospital, psychiatrist Dr. John Cawley, is hiding things, and he's determined to get to the bottom of it all. But in a place like Shutter Island, is there anyone, even himself, that he can really trust?

This movie took me two days to get through. It wasn't bad, necessarily, but it took a while to grab my attention. I was uninterested in Teddy and his hallucinations about his wife. Those two needed to get a room, which is a weird thing to have to say considering that she was technically dead.

The story picked up as Teddy gained more and more reasons to doubt the motives of everyone around him, but when the biggest twists were finally revealed, my reaction was something along the lines of "that's it?" I kept waiting for something else to be revealed, but no, that really was it. The setup was...a pretty big stretch. I did think, however, that Teddy's final line was excellent and chilling.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)… (mere)