Though it's an excellent, excellent piece of film-making with many great talents meshing beautifully and glorious cinematography, the high point came before the film.
Because nothing's going to top the preview for "Clash of the Titans," not even "Clash of the Titans" itself.
DAMN! THE! GODS!
"It's too late... Release the Kraken!"
Right. Anyway. Getting serious now.
IT'S BEEN SPOILERED PLENTY, SO HERE'S SOME MORE:
Dachau. Paperclip Nazis settled into comfy American sinecures where they conduct mind control experiments. The Bomb hanging over the world and making people go nuts. Psychiatry in transition from eugenics-inspired, unapolegetic brutality to the dream of psychopharmaceutical control with a liberal cast. Covert ops seeping into the supposedly firewalled domestic arena from the very first moment of their institutionalization in the postwar secret agencies. The anti-communist crusade. This real history is stitched together as a persuasive back-story to a fairly thrilling, scary story of Leo DiCaprio as an investigator on an island of nightmare psychiatry.
The supposedly twist ending is telegraphed repeatedly, especially since the commercials already told you to look for one. Soon as our heroic federal marshall (shades of Wild West) learns there are 66 patients on the island, you should not have to ask who will turn out to be the "No. 67" alluded to in an earlier McGuffin. The ending's revised rendering of what really had been going on during the first two hours was so implausible, however, even in comparison to the unlikely (but still compelling) story until that point, that I think that yes, the idea was the poor bastard had been successfully brainwashed into thinking he was an inmate and desiring his own lobotomy. For the "twist" version to be true, the 100 other characters in the film including the staff, guards and supposedly schizophrenic patients would have had to execute a scripted performance with more skill and better timing than a fully rehearsed theater troupe. Also, they would have had to time the hurricane! The idea also fails that his delusions were so complete that he didn't notice his "partner" was the man he'd known until then as the doctor treating him as though he was insane. His actions were coldly logical within the context of his supposed delusions - if he wasn't a cop, how was he so good at it? My main doubt about the thesis that he was brainwashed is whether he could be made to believe he'd had three children murdered by his wife. However, this could have also been true if he was the cop. So yeah, I'll go with Door No. 2, and also guess the partner was dead at the bottom of the cliff as he thought he saw, and that everything after he enters the lighthouse was being produced while he was strapped down.
But we're left free to pick either side, and very likely the filmmakers did not intend an answer. And either way it's fiction, hence a construct.
Since Hollywood audiences are trained to take things at face value, I see the ending as a cop-out insofar as it's meant to give them an out, a comforting delusion they are likelier to choose, that all that MK stuff was the fiction and the twist is the "reality." It's also the price of commercial success. You may safely doubt this movie would have been a hit with the critics, or even been produced in the first place if it had gone all the way, left out the "twist" and made clear the doctors were murdering him. The price of getting these real subjects into a full-fledged Hollywood production for two hours is to allow in the final 20 minutes that the protagonist is just another conspiracy theorist. Of course, everyone else was in a conspiracy to fool him, but for a "good" purpose.
