I wonder which three movies you’re talking about. I thought The Sixth Sense was really good, Unbreakable was profoundly silly and Signs was laughably bad.
Has he made two other “really good” movies I don’t know about?
Full movie recap. Don’t read if you still want to see it:
Secluded village run by a councel of elders. Among the elders are William Hurt (the leader), Brendan Gleeson, and Sigourney Weaver.
Early montages indicate that they settled the village within memory and are locked in by monsters of some kind that live in the surrounding woods. At some point a truce has been struck. The villagers stay out of the woods and the creatures stay out of the village.
Joaquin Phoenix is Weaver’s sun, a brooding introspective type. After a young child in the village dies of infection, he starts pressing for permission to risk a trip to “the towns” on the other side of the forest to bring back medicine. He is certain that the creatures will not hurt those with no bad intentions and a pure heart.
He is in love with Hurt’s daughter Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard, the best thing about the movie), who is blind. In a moment of daring, Phoenix goes a short distance into the woods. That night the creatures visit the village, marking homes with a red stripe. Dead, partially skinned animals also start showing up.
Certain that was his trip into the woods that brought them, Phoenix gives up on that quest and agrees to marry Ivy Walker.
Ivy was good friends with Noah, the village simpleton played by Adrien Brody. Noah seems an easy sort, but he also seemed pleased by signs of the creatures. When he learns of the planned marriage between Phoenix and Ivy, he critically wounds Phoenix by stabbing him several times (a scene that is underplayed and got quite a reaction out of the audience).
Ivy insists on going to the towns to get medicine that might save Phoenix. Hurt is appalled that crime has come to the village and before giving her permission, shares a terrible secret.
The creatures are actually the village elders in costume. They left the immoral towns years ago and created this mythology to keep the children (and eventually grandchildren from wanting to return), the creatures were based on a stories in a history of the area he once read.
So, Ivy (still blind) leaves for the towns with instructions to make sure that nobody knows where she came from and a list of supplies that could help Phoenix.
In the woods, she is attacked by (and kills) one of the creatures. Unfortunately this scene isn’t up to Shyamalan’s standards and isn’t all that frightening. Cutting back to the village, you learn that Noah has escaped his confinement with one of the monster costumes. Turns out he was the one killing and skinning the livestock. And he is the creature Ivy kills.
Eventually the hidden road leads to a wall. Climbing over the wall, she is met by a young man driving a animal preserve jeep. The name of the preserve is “Walker Something-or-other.” Simultaneously, the movie intercuts scenes of the elders looking through things they brought to the village with them. Photos and newspaper clippings from the mid-seventies, when each elder experienced some personal tragedy involving the violent death of loved ones. Hurt’s father was a billionaire murdered in his sleep.
Meeting in grief counselling sessions, Hurt gets the idea of setting up the preserve, putting in place rangers who will guard the perimeter but never enter, paying off Air Traffic Control to keep planes from flying over, and isolating themselves in inside.
The ranger is shocked to learn that she lives in the preserve but apparently liking her eyes, takes pity and gives her the medical supplies and lets her go back in.
That’s pretty much the end. Apparently the intent was to eventually bring the older children in on things so that they could continue. Don’t know how long they thought they could realistically carry it of.
OH CRAP!!
If a mod could fix my coding, it would very truly appreciated! I can’t believe I did that. Throughout the typing I kept saying to myself “preview this, preview this, you don’t want to screw this up” and then I screwed it up.
So sorry to anybody who reads that who didn’t want to.
Doc, is this a short story? It sounds so familiar, and it’s gonna drive me crazy now.
These spoilers don’t sound promising, but it has to be better than Signs. (Although that isn’t saying much.) I can sorta kinda see how it could be good with that premise, but it’d have to be done with a great deal more subtlety than we’ve seen since Unbreakable.
I thought the movie was boring and the twist incredibly lame. In other words, I ended up agreeing with Ebert. Save your money, people!
I liked it, but it was not up to the standards of his previous movies, and here’s why (this is based only on seeing Signs, Unbreakable, and now The Village, but from what I understand, it applies to Sixth Sense as well): All of Shyamalan’s movies are about perception of reality. Regardless of what the plot is, they are driven by how the characters in the movie see reality, and are structured so that the audience is never quite certain what the truth is. Except The Village.
[spoiler]Towards the beginning of Signs, Rev. Hess recites a little monologue to Merrill, about (paraphrasing here) how you see things in this world, and you have to choose how to fit those things into your world-view. He used to see everything as a manifestation of God, until his wife died. Now he’s lost his philosophical anchor, and doesn’t know how to deal with anything. He anguishes over his wife’s last words, not knowing how to interpret them. Then, at the end of the movie, it becomes clear to him. He has his faith again, and sees how his wife’s dying words were a message from God, allowing him to protect his family in their moment of need. But, as the audience, how do we know that she was channeling God? Perhaps she was just babbling as she died, and Hess chose to interpret that as being from above. There’s no way to be sure. And thus Shyamalan reinforces the speech that Hess gave earlier, that every person must choose how to view the world. Hess has chosen God, and everything makes sense again, at least to him.
Jumping back to Unbreakable (which I saw after Signs), we have David Dunn, a rather ordinary man, with ordinary problems. Then he becomes the “sole survivor” of a horrific accident, and he is contacted by Elijah, who tells him that he is “unbreakable.” At first David thinks the guy’s a loon, but as they talk again and again, what Elijah is saying begins to make sense, it starts to match David’s life and experiences. Elijah tells him that he can’t be hurt, but that he is vulnerable to water, as his near-drowning as a child proves, and his “hunches” are a super-power as well. David, acting on his new faith in Elijah’s theory, follows and overpowers the criminal, almost drowning in the process. Thus, Elijah is proved correct. But was he? Other than the “hunch,” did we see David do anything that a normal man couldn’t do? He certainly didn’t prove his unbreakability. When he fell out of the window, he landed in the pool, anyone could survive that. And then he almost drowned, but anyone else could have drowned in that situation also, being trapped by the cover. When he subdued the criminal, he didn’t do anything extraordinary except avoid getting hurt. So in the end, what’s real? Elijah is undoubtedly insane, but was he right or was he wrong? Is David unbreakable, or just lucky?
Now, in The Village, Shyamalamalan sets it up in a similar way to his previous movies. Here’s the village, with all the difficulties of any group of people: loss, love, secrets. Oh yeah, it’s also got these half-seen bogey-men. Shyamalan sets up the whole situation so that the audience is unsure of what’s really going on. Small comments confuse the issue, making it seem as there’s something underneath it all, but not saying what. The plot goes about its business, and it’s eventually revealed what the secret is. And this is right where I fell out of it. In his other movies, Shyamalan took pains to make sure that you left the theatre not really being sure what happened. Was it real or not? Do I interpret it this way or that way? You can’t really be sure. But in The Village, you can be sure. It was all a plot by the elders to protect themselves from the outside world. The elders created the creatures, Noah was the one skinning the animals, and they all lived in a preserve. The only thing tickling my brain about it was that I don’t see how Noah could have skinned all those animals while he was at the wedding, but Shyamalan didn’t address that, or give any other plausible explanation for the event. If he had given clues that maybe the creatures were real, then he’d have an out, but I didn’t see anything like that. (And I saw absolutely nothing that would give any creedence to the lumberjacks/trees theory.)
So that’s my complaint, that he tied up the loose ends too completely. As gatopescado says, it really was like a Scooby-Doo script. But this doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy it. The performances were good, Shyamalan can still make things creepy and tense, but the twist made too much sense. I’d have been satisfied if it turned out that they did live on a preserve, but there was still something unexplained.[/spoiler]
Oh yeah, I am now completely in love with Bryce Dallas Howard.
Did anyone else catch Shyamalan’s cameo?
Not to show support for our troops?
I’m glad I read this thread, because now there’s no way I’ll see this movie. I hate, hate, hate it when good SF/fantasy writers eliminate the fantastic from their stories. It’s a cop-out, almost as bad as “it was all just a dream”. Shyamalan has created a beautiful, well-crafted cinematic universe where the real and the supernatural can co-exist, and now he pisses all over it with tricks.
What is it with this year? First they make a version of the Illiad without gods, then they make an Arthurian film without magic, and now they make an M. Night Shyamalan film without the supernatural! Has Hollywood decided that the public can’t deal with fantastic elements in their movies? That would be odd, considering that their biggest hits of the past few years - LotR, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Carribbean and all those comic book films - have been chock full of ghosts, prophecies and magic swords. I though Hollywood was good at ripping itself off. Why have they suddenly come to believe that realism sells?
What about all those premonitions he had while touching people? I’d say being able to see a private scene from someone else’s life, in full-color, is more than a hunch. Or what about that scene where he bench presses something like 500 pounds? Or the scene in flashback where he rips the door off the crashed car to save his (then) girlfriend?
Something other than a movie? Go for the gusto! Do something different! Try a restaurant you haven’t tried! Anything to get you away from movie theatre butter… 
Jenny Hanniver Or shall I call you devilfish? [sub]This is not an accusation of sock puppetry. It is a joke based on a use of the name Jenny Hanniver[/sub]
There may be a short story. But, AFAIK I made it up.
One of the reasons I like this Board so much is it allows me to read threads like this and conclude “I think I’ll save my money!”
I think DIOGENES’ guess . . .
. . . About the Village being trees, and the monsters being loggers . . .
. . . sounds like a much more interesting movie than the plot as described. Actually, minus the monsters, it sounds remarkably like a mediocre children’s book called . . .
Running Out of Time, in which a girl is raised in some nineteenth century village, but then the children start getting sick with fevers, and her mother tells her that actually it’s the late 20th century and she has to escape from the village/preserve (which the elders don’t want her to do) and go find help. In the end, you discover the people running the preserve were actually intentionally introducing sicknesses, using the Village as a big medical experiment.
Say, even that plot sounds better than this one.
Well. I just got back from seeing this movie, and I have to say I think it may be the worst film I’ve ever seen in a theater. This is not hyperbole. It really is that bad.
To put this in perspective…I saw The Perfect Score last week, and I think it was more enjoyable than this load of pretentious tripe. And I hated The Perfect Score.
So, what was wrong with The Village? Well, as others have remarked already, the “twist” is highly disappointing and up there with a “all a dream” copout.
The dialogue is laughable to say the least. Adrien Brody’s character is a blubbering idiot (literally)(not much of a spoiler, but I figure people may want to be surprised about what Brody’s role is like) and he has probably the best lines in the film.
It’s even less scary than Signs, astonishingly.
The first part of the movie, before you see what is terrorizing the village, were among the most painful minutes of my filmgoing career. And it doesn’t get much better from there. Avoid at all costs. Save your money and use it for dart targets or something. You’ll get more satisfaction.
Me, too. She is AMAZING in this! I was very surprised that a virtual unknown (yes, I know who her dad is) was given the job of carrying most of the movie. Her performance alone was worth the price of admission for me. Wow!
As for the rest. I thought it was much like the rest of M. Knight’s films. Weak on story, but great at creating mood and atmosphere. The twist was pretty lame, and the explanation of how it was all possible came across like someone’s eighth grade creative writing assignment.
I rolled my eyes at this point in the movie–it just seemed terribly obvious that he was trying really hard to be clever here. I kept expecting him to look into the camera (sort of) and to wink and wave at the audience.
Red is “the bad color” because it is the color of blood, which they associate with murder. And Ivy did not kill Adrian Brody. She tricked him into falling into a big pit in the woods. Considering he oh, wasn’t blind, his death was his own fault and he had it coming anyway. There are no loggers and the villagers are not trees. And at the end of the movie yes, they are still continuing the lie, because they plan to explain Adrian’s death to the villagers by telling them he went into the woods and the monsters killed him.
Here’s your rolled eyes: :rolleyes: Seriously, the guy can’t act (even though you only hear is his voice in this one), so WHY must he appear in all his movies? He’s like Quentin Tarantino, except that QT can actually direct.
It also sounds a little bit like a cartoon movie from about 1992 called FernGulley: The Last Rainforest.
Can I get a ‘worst plot twist ever?’
I guess I’m in the minority here, because I really liked the movie.
I was totally engrossed in the atmosphere.
I actually sort of guessed the ending beforehand. I mean, they have a bunch of elders ruling, so I figured they were probably scaring people to keep them under control.
I really liked the fantasy of it. I mean, when she emerged out of the preserve, it really felt like she was entering a different world.
You’re not alone, dry gear, I liked it as well.
I thought it was beautifully shot, well acted, and the soundtrack was gorgeous.
It was not a horror movie, but I did not enter into it expecting it to be one. In my opinion, none of Shyamalan’s films really are. They’ve always seemed to be more focussed on mood than plot. I don’t like them any less for this.
SPOILERISH
Frankly, I don’t know why people go to his movies expecting actual “scary monsters”.
You don’t just hear his voice in this one. Did you miss the reflection of his face in the glass door of the fridge? That’s what I meant by him trying to be clever, but coming across as obvious and hokey.