The Village [100% Spoilers]

[Prophet Tenebrae]

I've just seen it... I have to say, this film has been aggressively overhyped to the point where most people will walk out the cinema feeling they must have seen trailers for a different film.

M. Night again shows his diminishing returns - his style of pacing that worked so wonderfully in Sixth Sense, reasonably well in Unbreakable and rather poorly  in Signs here is one of the films cardinal flaws. Essentially it takes the film over an hour to actually get to the relevant part - where we discover that, surprise surprise, there are no monsters it was all a big trick.

It wouldn't be an exaggeration to think that M. Night's (one should always get worried when a director becomes sufficiently egotistical to prefix a film with his own name) The Village - might as well be called, The Pseudo Amish. I waited the whole film for a buggy... I didn't see one.

One should appreciate that this is not a monster film - despite the advertising which makes you think it is. Really, it doesn't even have that much "monster" tension at the start. In fact, the first hour of the film doesn't really seem to achieve anything IMO - one doesn't really get that much of a feel for characters or the like.

Attempting to trick you into thinking the creatures are real when the blind girl is in the woods seems a bit foolish. As it's really not too hard to guess what it really is.

This film is essentially a morality lecture about how our society is so evil, that people are driven to escape it by being a rip-off of the Amish people, enforced by the threat of fictious monsters, all nicely ringed off and guarded from the outside world somehow.

A pretty poor effort, in my opinion - 2 out of 5.

[odinn7]

My wife and I saw this movie while on vacation. I was angered by the hype, the manipulated advertising and then actually seeing this long and drawn out crap and it's completely ridiculous and easy to figure out story. I was left sitting there when it was over, waiting for something else to happen, something unexpected. I thought the twist might be that the credits weren't really the end of the movie : -)
My wife, who usually likes crap like this, also hated it and was annoyed that we wasted our time seeing it. This doesn't even fall into the "so bad it's good" category because it's just plain BAD and boring to boot.

[trekgeezer]

You can probably blame the studio for the hype and advertising the movie like they did. They did the same thing with Signs.

[AndyC]

The thing that puzzles me is that the TV spots for this have said that Ebert and Roper have called it one of the year's best. This really amusing review by Roger Ebert would suggest that the statement is somewhat misleading. Check it out

[mr. henry]

check out roger ebert's review...he totally trashed this film...one star.

[Dave Munger]

Speaking of two-dimentional characters as Ebert's review does, when are they going to make a movie out of Edwin Abbot Abbot's "Flatland"?

ftp://ftp.archive.org/pub/etext/etext94/flat11.txt

I've got Amazon links to some sequels and other books here:

http://homepages.tscnet.com/wmunger/books.htm

[Dave Munger]

Does the perfidy of Shamalamabingdong know no bounds?

http://www.phildennison.net/archives/2004/08/10/he-took-our-jobs/

[Fearless Freep]

Well, to be honest, it doesn't seem to be that an original an idea.

I mean, the old Star Trek episode with Landru seems pretty close..

[Susan]

Why is this film a suprise? To tell the truth i figured out the entire twist in the first 20 minutes (i've found a common factor of most twist/thrillers is that everything is usually revealed in the first half hour if you pay close enough attention)

All of shyamalan's films seem to dictate there are no real monsters - except ourselves. They're chocked full of metaphors and symbolic meanings (the blind girl being a prime example). no matter how much the film gets trashed people are still going to see it because they are curious.

[Yaddo42]

Richard Roeper gave the film an outstanding review, he's the one who said one of the year's ten best, IIRC. Although even among the rare positive reviews of the film, his praise does seem the exception. Everytime I think he's getting to be a better film critic he does stuff like this. Then again, Ebert gave "Little Black Book" a gushing review on the show, even Roeper thought it was stupid, so maybe ole Roger is slipping like so many think.

But it is dishonest of the studio to use the name of the show with that quote in ads. They probably realize using just Roeper name doesn't carry the same weight, as well if his name is used without Ebert's folks will figure out Ebert hated it, like it matters at this point. When Siskel was still alive, studio's seemed less eager after a while to use positive blurbs from Siskel or Ebert about their films in ads if the other didn't like it; guess they wanted the "two thumbs up" blurb or nothing.

[AndyC]

Funny, this is one of those movies that I thought was at least OK (if a little disappointing) at the time, but feels like more of a disappointment the more I think about it.

Basically, Shamalamalamon wrote an Outer Limits episode and sold it as a great movie.

[Dave Munger]

"Signs" was like that for me. To some extent, so was "The Sixth Sense". Some of the stuff towards the end makes less sense now that I've thought about it. Sure, that one girl was murdered, and there's a videotape of it (odds?), so the little boy can help her out by finding the tape. But then it turns out he's supposed to be running errands for ALL of the dead people he sees. What's he supposed to do for guilty people who were executed 200 years ago? The kid who accidentally shot himself? Ghosts who can't point him to some hidden widget of justice?