I managed to get a ticket earlier in the year to an ‘evening with Martin Scorsese’.  Very exclusive.  Just me, Marty and fifty film nuts at the BFI.  I convinced myself I was sat next to someone hugely famous and then realised it was Paul Gambachini and he is ALWAYS there, so, erm, no I wasn’t.  Fab evening, mainly to raise some cash for the Rescue the Hitchcock 9 campaign that the BFI is right to press on with.  Anyway in the Q&A, I asked Marty a predictably question about his ‘favourite British movie’ and the great man shared his eulogy about “amazing” [his words] Ben Kingsley and his portrayal of a psycho-nutter in the rather fab Sexy Beast.  What was clear was the venerable Sir Ben had made quite an impression on Mr Scorsese.  It was not until I saw Shutter Island that the penny dropped.  Kingsley is the best thing in it.   I have never met Christopher Nolan and I am not sure I would know where to start if I did, because I have seen two of his films: The Dark Knight and Inception.  One is the biggest pile of over-hyped billion-dollar making garbage and sickness I have wasted three hours of my life on.  The other one was Inception.  Infact, Inception was blown-away good.  Like The Matrix good.  Or The Usual Suspects.  That good. What struck me though, watching Leo struggle through the perfectly delineated storyline of a dream within a dream within a dream... was that; “it's the same plot as Shutter Island”.  Leo must have been having DE JA VU when he was given the two scripts to read.  In both films we have an exhausted man, dislocated from comfort and warmth, pursued by supernatural killers, haunted over and over again by guilt and remorse.  Ultimately, he misses his kids.  Both Leo’s long for home.  When he sees his wife — on both films, she is a figure of danger, not a haven of love.  In both films, the Directors use images of the children as a motif for a longing for the real world, a world that is lost.  Except Nolan does this brilliantly and Scorsese doesn’t.  The murder scene of the kids in Shutter Island is just exploitative, over-long, unsettling and plonked onto the end of narrative.  The suicide scene in the Inception is integral to the narrative and is elegantly and movingly part of the story.  Given the heritage of the two Directors, it’s fascinating to conclude; Inception will be viewed and loved and debated for years and Shutter Island, won’t.   I read reviews at the time that talked about the “brilliant twist” at the end of Shutter Island.  If you’ve not seen it, don’t worry, there isn’t one.  This is not Sixth Sense or The Usual Suspects.   If you watch the first five minutes of Shutter and haven’t worked it out, you have been too busy reading the terms and conditions printed on the back of your ticket stub.  Inception keeps you guessing all the way home.  

Inception vs Shutter Island.  Sorry Mr Scorsese, but no contest.