It simply defies comprehension: Shutter Island

Doesn't Martin Scorsese make great movies? Yes, when he can get out of his own way. There may be a great, or at least a good, movie lurking somewhere inside of Scorsese's miserable "Shutter Island," but to get there you'd have to strip away layers of mannerism and pretension and just tell the story. Too many dream sequences. Too many flashbacks to the trauma of a soldier (DiCaprio) who liberated Dachau and saw the horrors. Too many scenes in which ghost of wife (Michelle Williams) appears in dream of fantasy. So strip all that away and then what? (Spoilers to follow - have to talk about end of story) This is a story so Gothic and convoluted that it defies comprehension, let alone credibility. At the end, we face two possibilities: Leo has spent two years in a psychiatric prison and the entire film, in which he sees the hospital as evil and criminal, is his distorted vision OR Leo is right that the hospital is run by a cruel doctor engaged in mind experiments and he has been victimized and imprisoned because he's approached the truth. Either way, Scorsese has broken a fundamental compact that a filmmaker establishes with his audience: when there are obvious visual/auditory clues that some scenes are dreams or visions, we have to believe than that the other scenes are real and not hallucinatory. This film is all over the place, and never clear to the audience, or maybe to anyone else, as to what scenes are real. It's a confusing mess. If it's meant to be a massive conspiracy against DiCaprio, I could have accepted that - but with so much unresolved ambiguity about which characters are real, which are just his own visions, in fact about whether the entire fir hour of the film (his arrival at the hospital as a U.S. Marshall assigned to investigate an escape) ever actually happened, the movie just pushes the audience away rather than engages us on any level, neither emotionally nor intellectually. A grand failure. Finally, this was obviously not filmed in the Boston Harbor Islands (where Lehane's source novel is set), so why even bother to retain that idea as the setting - just makes the movie even more ridiculous for anyone from New England.