Shutter Island

          The book I’m currently reading is Shutter Island. The book should be kept as a film, because it’s moderately short. Most TV series are also book series, and so much happens in the 369 pages of Shutter Island it’d be hard to space it all out. One of the most important scenes in the beginning of the book is that the main character’s wife died. Her name was Delores. She died in an apartment fire, and the fire was arson. The guy who started the fire is apparently at Ashcliffe (Shutter Island) and Teddy soon becomes obsessed with finding the man who killed his wife. The next important scene in the book is about the mental patient that went missing, Rachel. She drowned her three kids in the lake behind her house and then sat them down at the dinner table like nothing even happened. The best part is, she invited her neighbor in to have food with her and her three dead kids around the dinner table. She’s a schizophrenic, and she had no idea she had even killed her kids. It’s important because why would she be in a mental institution in the middle of nowhere if she never did something horrible?
          One twist that I think the movie should keep is that the doctor of the island, is on vacation. He goes on vacation the day after Rachel goes missing, which is really strange. They emphasize it a lot in the book, so I picture that it could come back sometime in the future and it could be important. There’s a scene where Chuck and Teddy get stuck in a graveyard during a hurricane on the island, and they flee to a mausoleum that’s open. In there, that’s where they really get to know each other. They tell each other personal stories, and they crack the code that Rachel left behind before she disappeared. To leave that out, we’d lose personal information about both Chuck and Teddy, and we may not know what the code Rachel left meant.

            Teddy would need to be a tall male, preferably attractive, who is a leader-type looking person. His partner, Chuck, I picture him being a tall male, with curly brown hair and defenseless looking. Much less tough than Teddy. Rachel, the missing patient, would need to be a beautiful, brown haired woman with a loud voice, because she screams and yells a lot. She’s beautiful, but psycho. I see Teddy’s wife as a young, busty blonde with curly hair. He talks about her a lot, and even though she’s dead, he has flashbacks of her all the time.

            The soundtrack to the movie is most important. It’s what people hear when there’s no dialogue. Shutter Island gives me a really creepy vibe. So I think there should be eerie, mysterious music playing in the background. If there was happy music playing, that wouldn’t make any sense. It’s an island with a bunch of psycho murderers locked up with one of them missing, I feel like suspenseful music would fit perfectly. There’s also a scene in the book where Teddy gets into an argument with a patient that he knew. The music there would be very loud and intense, because it gets really heated and the patient is really creepy looking.

            One thing the movie should not ever change, is the ending. It turns out, Teddy is actually a psycho killer named Andrew Laediss, who has lived on the island for two years. He used to be a US Marshall, but he murdered his wife, Dolores, who killed their three kids, Daniel, Edward and Rachel. His whole life is an illusion. He doesn’t believe he’s Andrew, he believes he’s Teddy and that his wife was killed in an apartment fire a few years back. The doctors on the island set the whole story up to try and bring Teddy, or Andrew, to his senses. They created a fake plot, in which a patient went missing, Chuck, his partner, is actually the doctor they told us In the book at the beginning went on vacation, and made Teddy believe he was actually a US Marshall. If they changed the ending, to make it so Teddy was actually sane and got off the island safely and went back home, half of the movie wouldn’t make sense. The dreams he has about his dead wife and kids, the migraines he gets, the fact that the code Rachel left behind is telling him there’s a patient 67, none of it would make sense.