The Village

First off, M. Night Shyamalan is a genius. Secondly, even the brightest of us make our mistakes (I digress...). I'm still trying to figure out if M. did that here.

It was a good movie, if only for the fact that it accomplished what I expected of it: it successfully had me intensely frightened a couple times. I love that feeling. I really wish he could have done it a little more before continuing with the story, but he had a movie to make. He tried to do a weak sort of encore fright-session late in the plot that didn't quite do it for me (you could figure it out at that point).

Ok, so no spoilers for the synopsis here. Just the basics. You get quickly led to the perception that your somewhere in the northeastern Midwest (can you say Pennysylvannyia?) in the later half of the 1800's. Small village surrounded by PA type forestry. "They" are out there in the forest. Apparently no one in the village can get out to the rest of the world without getting killed or taken or whatever by "them." Boy meets girl, blah blah blah, and before you know it, "them" is causing trouble. In the meantime, a strange sub-plot is developing, all along, of these "elder" folk (right from the beginning, actually - M does a good job of lacing very subtle hints early on). Long story short, someone needs some medicine, and through a series of twists, someone goes to get the medicine. Ok this "not giving spoilers" garbage isn't working. I'm just going to give up right here.

Through most of the movie, I liked the twists we were taken on. Pretty good flick. I think M could have re-written the last 1/4 or so of the movie to make it a lot better. I don't know how (that's M's job), but it left something to be desired, in the end. But it was a good movie, and it was directed by a person who has "Night" for one of their names. And that's cool.

I'll see it again, not in the theater, but I like his stuff, and I like being scared.

That is all. I have to wake up in 4 hours.

UPDATE:

This one needed more time to think through. M. raised some good issues with his movie, and while I've churned through at least a couple of them, I don't find any of them easy to set forth. I believe one of the characters in the film actually spoke to one of the issues, saying something about how you can run from sorrow, but it will always find you. Insulation, let's call that one. At least 2 others would be the necessity of sacrifice, and the whole "love-can-inspire-the-extraordinary" bit.

I think M. had some things to say here, and said them. The movie went where it needed to go, to that end. It was well done, over all. And its the first good flick that I've seen in quite a while that wasn't rife with unpleasant (and most times unnecessary) material. For that, I'm giving it a 7 and a half.