Doubt you'd lose anyone with a twist that would get me. I couldn't work out what the twist was going to be in something like U-Turn, but it wasn't a hard film to follow...it just had many twists.

Some of the problems you have with films are the expectations created by marketing...I was expecting a twist therefore I was analysing it from the word go....the trailer showed Di Caprio going to a lunatic asylum and going mad. If I'd just watched it without seeing that, who knows what I would have thought?

Ok, well I'll see if I can get ya then. Will be posting next week. No obligation to read on your part, but if you do, we'll see if a got the twist by you.

Watched this again despite saying that I had no inclination to.

Must say it has surprising replay value...I actually appreciated the story more when I wasn't following the twist.

The conflict with the different schools of psychiatry and his internal conflict were very strong. Ben Kingsley is fantastic.

Better than I gave it credit for.

Would definitley recommend people watch it twice.

Disagree, Rick.  I watched it twice and the 2nd time was even worse for me than the first, as I expected it would be.

I thought Ben Kingsley was rather weak here.  I really didn't buy much about his performance.  For me, he's either hit or miss in a role, and this was a miss...

I thought it was perfect. He played the role of the caring doctor whilst still being seemingly part of a creepy conspiracy pitch perfectly.

I think what put me off the first time round was the feeling of disappointment that it wasn't real..it was sort of an anti-climax.

Watching it again, it was a much more complete film than I at first realised.

Excellent film and destined to be one of Mart's neglected babies. Doesn't detract from its beauty at all.

Let's be honest. Horror isn't Scorsese' genre. I liked Cape Fear but that's because it was solid thriller elevated by Robert De Niro's performance. Shutter Island was horrible.
I felt at some points Scorsese was drowning his film in atmosphere and absurdly oppressive music cues.  

Totally agree!  I wouldn't call it horrible, but it definitely wasn't good or great, and the biggest problem was the false advertising that it was horror.

WEAK!

In sci fi and horror, movies where we are unsure of whether something is a dream or not are common. What was different about this, however, was the blending of the two. You can't accuse this of having the "it was all a dream" plot. Decaprio's character's mind is creating an alternate reality, as a self defense mechanism, but it is not just using old memories as substance for this. It is blending pieces of reality into the mix. To add to that, the psychologists are taking advantage of this alternate reality and trying to use it to reach the patient for his own benefit. That's pretty unique.

The twist did not fool Rick. But I guarantee it fooled 95% of the audiences in the theater. I think the intelligent viewer suspected about half way what was going on, at least in part, but by then they did a good job of grabbing you into the movie, and you were still not sure, and were wondering about the details of it.

I think it was easy to feel for DeCaprio's character too. He was perhaps guilty of unintentionally neglecting his wife. When she became ill, he could not face that himself, so he blocked it from his mind, turned to drinking. Very understandable.

You also had the WW 2 memories and how that was used to try to mislead the viewer as to what might be going on, but it also played critically into the theme that even good people, under terrible circumstances, will do terrible things. In the camps they murdered the Nazi guards. In his life, he murdered his wife. Both actions were understandable. Both were the kind of things that will create tremendous guilt, the kind that's difficult to live with.

You had the aspect of competing psychological therapies. The film was beautifully shot.

I almost get the feeling that if some producer had jumped in at the last second, changed the script to where some random people had their throats slit; and some kind of evil creature appeared out of nowhere and without explanation, but which ate someone; then the movie would make little sense, but horror people would love it. Said with all due respect horror people!!

I didn't hate it at all.  I just felt rooked based on the trailers.

I thought it was slow and dull much of the long run time, and although the payoff/twist/reveal was the best part of the movie, and did surprise me, it didn't redeem the movie overall, IMO.

2nd viewing was much worse cause there was no surprise at the end.

Bring on some flesh eating creatures for no reason and let them eat some people!!  YES!!!  

It did get slow about 3/4 through. It reached that dreaded point when you say, ok, finish this thing!

And the trailers did create a different expectation, though I'm not sure if that could have been avoided.

Now head out and get some flesh to eat tonight Jeff!

The atmosphere he created is a demo of how talented he is. That omnipotent feeling of fear he injected into the film was incredible to absorb and definitely to the film's advantage.