I actually love Shaymamanayamalamandalan’s work. I think he really captures a dark and eerie mood in every one of his movies. I love his interior shots as well; the scenes shot indoors, in cramped, darkened rooms, are really good. There is just this haunting atmosphere he excells at capturing. I just think he could have done a better job with The Village. And what the hell was the deal with Adrien Brody in such an undignified, weird role? Am I the only one thinking that he is too elegant to be stuck playing a tard? Brody should have had Joaquin Phoenix’s role.
The monster looks like a deformed porcupine.
I liked it. Yeah, it was by far the leats well-written of his works. Not as deep as Signs, or as clever as Unbreakable. And yep, even if you haven’t been spoiled the twist is so freaking obvious that it’s barely worth spoiler boxing. He really needs to stop using twist endings (although Signs didn’t really have one). They lose so much impact when you know one’s coming from the director’s name alone.
Still, even after springing the main twist, he was able to keep some suspense. The critter in the woods was pretty tense. Although, I agree, not quite as good as teh ghosts in the Sixth Sense, or the night in the basement in Signs.
I liked Brody in this. He seemed exactly what he was played up as. The innocent who was too good and child-like to fear the monsters. Brody doesn’t have to play teh same part every time. Also, I was convinced that Phoenix was going to ahve to save Iris. That was a nifty reversal of expectations, and a better twist than the actual twist.
He makes it work, still, but it’s the weakest of his films by far.
I actually love the fact that Shayamyanalanamayan has fallen into that specific niche of filmmaking, of the “surprise twist ending” thing. I love that. I’m so sick of all the predictable movies today. I think S. should take it a step further and his next movie should have two twists or even more than that, to make it even more interesting.
Another person who liked it here. I agree there were many flaws as discussed above, but I thought it was entertaining, I liked the overall concept, and liked the actors, especially Bryce Howard and William Hurt.
P.S. Isn’t Bryce a boy’s name?? 
I don’t know about your childhoods, but when I was growing up, if there was a vast seculded expanse of land, a “preserve,” off-limits and fenced in, you better believe the boys I knew would be over that fence in a heartbeat and exploring, guards or not.
Also wouldn’t sattelite photos of the area show the villiage? I can look up sattelite photos of anywhere online (terraserver, etc.) so someone would have seen that and wondered what it is.
I’ve known a couple of guys named Bryce. However, I read an article (sorry, I can’t remember what magazine so no cite) where she mentions that she was named after Bryce Canyon. It’s a beautiful canyon (and a national park) in Utah.
Sorry for this huge hijack, but someone brought up something from another movie and I can’t think of the name of the movie. Sorry, it’ll be quick.
What is that animated movie set in a forest or jungle where people use red spraypaint to mark the trees that will be cut down?
Yes, me too.
What was undignified about Adrien Brody’s role? I thought he did a good job of showing a struggle between what he was taught to be right and the impulses to do things that were wrong, all without speaking. That seems like a good role for the resume. Oh yeah, nothing wrong with Phoenix either.
I liked the movie. Great mood and settings with just little things out of place to make you wonder. Besides the previously mentioned Howard, who I’m now pining over, I thought William Hurt was very good in his role. The biggest problem with Shyamalan’s movies is that you know a twist is coming so you tend to get distracted from the movie thinking about the twist. Horror is not really his genre, but I bet he could set the mood for one hell of a horror movie.
Sham-a-lam-a-ding-dong is yet another “my movies only work if the protagonists are idiots” writer/director
Unbreakable, not so bad, it was at least set in “our” world.
Signs? What farming community doesn’t have a frikkkin’ SHOTGUN in every (or at least every other) house? The alien survival time in the real cornbelt would have been measured in minutes. Course what advanced alien civ. skips over the difficult “raincoat” and “umbrella” technologies to begin with? And chooses to ignore the 75% surface covered by water problem, not to mention the automated sprinkler threat.
With the Village, I second that the nature of boys would lead to penetration of the myth pretty quick, unless the elders are willing to KILL their own kids to prevent the secret being found out. Thinking back to me and my friends at 10, the first time we got run out of the woods by a monster would quickly lead to Operation Kill/Catch-me-one-a-them. Parental prohibitions are like gas on a fire.
Shamyalan was obviously not a country boy.
And teemingOne, I think that was the aforementioned “Ferngully”.
That’s exactly the point. When you KNOW there’s a twist coming, it becomes predictable. If the twist ending is telegraphed, which this one apparently was in the worst way, then you do have another predictable movie.
I don’t know… I’ve never been a big fan, but it sorta sounds like he’s running a little low on ideas right now. 
The movie has a satellite picture of the area actually. In the “ranger’s” office.
Was it just me or was the sub-theme……anti-religious. Here we’ve got a group of kids being led by elders to believing that they have to work within these confines of society. In fact, they have to spend a lot of time being vigilant against these “beasts” from keeping them into their world by hiding the color red, constructing and using watch towers, and keeping the torches on the peripheries burning. Only to find out that this whole society/belief system has been fabricated by the elders.
Maybe, but I really don’t think it stands up to that kind of analysis (unlike, I would argue, Signs). I noticed that the community, which was a Utopian retreat, even by 1890’s standards, was surprisingly unreligious. If Shamalan was trying to have a message against organized religion (as opposed to the personal faith of Signs) who could have given some to the villagers. Christians would have identified the creatures as connected with the devil anyway.
It could have worked, if he spent more time exploring the themes of how they’ve built up this fear in the children until it escaped control. Have some elders start to doubt whether the creature is real, that kind of thing. Make it about legends and stories, not just things in the woods. He’s great at tone, but theme and plot really escaped him this time.
One reason that this twist seemed so bad was that it was unlike the twists in his previous filsm. Coale really could see dead people. Bruce Willis’ character really was some kind of real-life superhero. The farm really was under attack by aliens (or something very much like aliens). The twists (if signs even has a twist) is of the “but wait, there’s more” variety rather than the “everything you know is wrong” type. The latter is much harder to pull off and can feel lame, or a cheat if not done just right.
I really liked the first 3/4s of the film. Shymalan is great at building up a sense of mystery and dread. And Lucius and Ivy are both such great characters. When the twist–which I had guessed early on in the film–was revealed; the movie lost of a lot of its power for me. I think that it would have been much more interesting if
The creatures had been real, and that they were trying to communicate with the villagers in their own alien way.
I found it very disturbing how the Elders, who basically come across as sympathetic, organized a community based on fear and ignorance. Especially because the implication is that
Walker was willing to let his daughter go blind and the other Elder was willing to let his young son die for lack of modern medicines instead of exposing them to the possibility of violence in the outside world. If I had to pick between the relatively small risk of being a violent crime victim and the much larger risk of dying of ganrene, scarlet fever, puerpural fever, etc., I know which I’d choose for my children. I know that the Elders had all been personally scarred by violence, but it still bothered me.
A few things annoyed me.
First, where did all the people come from? We see a photo from their group therapy days with only a handful of people in it, all of whom we can recongize as the elders. Since it seems pretty obvious that all of the elders are the original settlers, where did all of the younger people come from? They haven’t been in the woods that long–maybe 20-25 years, but there seem to be more young adults than elder families. Why would some people agree to come but not be elders?
Also, the timeline drove me nuts. In the beginning of the film, they all sit down to eat and have corn on the cob. Therefore, it’s probably mid-late summer. Then we see the leaves fall of the trees. And they eat outside again (wouldn’t it be cold? Also, why does no one ever shut doors behind them?). After that we see a garden with what looks like cabbage and broccoli (which are not typically fall crops). And then we get ice storms.
So were we to belive that it’s Noah all along killing the animals? If so, why was he so clueless about how to clean blood off his hands? I was thinking it was maybe the elder who had his child die.
I thought Scott Weinberg’s review of it was accurate,
“When you find yourself bored and wishing a movie would speed up and get to the TWIST ENDING already…well, that’s not a particularly good movie, now is it?” 
Nope; The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs are in fact the three good movies I was referring to. Sorry for any confusion.
Notes:
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The director’s name is M. Night Shyamalan. Yes, there are three a’s in his last name. It’s really not that difficult.
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Not to hijack, but I feel compelled to point out, for perhaps the thirtieth time, that the actions of the creatures in Signs are nonsensical only if you assume that they’re aliens from another planet who came to Earth in spaceships. That’s a huge leap, and although people in the movie think that’s what’s happened, there’s no reason for us to.
Saw The Village this afternoon. All of Shyamalan’s movies that I’ve seen tend to work better on an emotional and thematic level than on a literal, logical level; this is true of The Village most of all. There are huge logical holes that can’t be ignored, and the big twist is both too predictable and too much of a letdown given the effective set-up in the first half of the movie. At the same time it raises strong themes that are worth exploring. The “elders” tried to hide from the world’s crime and violence, but couldn’t hide from human nature. Crime isn’t something imposed on humanity from outside; it’s part of us, and always has been. The monsters are us. Also, you can only protect children so much; the kind of innocence that the “elders” wanted to preserve relies on ignorance and fear.
Maybe it would have worked better if the premise had been made clear early on, instead of being hidden for a big surprise.
All in all, I’d say it’s Shyamalan’s least successful script. Of course, these things are relative; Shyamalan’s worst movie would be orders of magnitude better than the best work that, say, Michael Bay will ever produce in his life.
That’s a good point. You’d have to top the fence with barbed wire, electrify it, and make an enormous show of force to discourge kids. You get a group of bored 15 year-old boys who know of the mysterious preserve on the edge of town, and they WILL go to the trouble to get wooden ladders and heavy blankets to go over the fence at 3 am.
Let’s face it, M. Night hasn’t shown a great talent for closing plot holes. Aliens that can jump straight onto Mel Gibson’s room can’t break through a pantry door; they can find the earth from light years away, but have to make patterns in corn fields to find major cities than can clearly be seen at night from space. Water burns the aliens!!! What the HECK did they think they were going to do when coming here? Water pours from the sky at random points, and it’s maybe the most common molecule on the planet. That idea is so dumb as to earn my eternal scorn. Their skin would be slowly coming apart as soon as they landed just from the atmospheric humidity. Simply stupid.
Is it possible for someone to be a talented hack? How about: He’s talented at mood, but plot plausibility really escapes him.
Wait… How do we know that
Noah was the one killing and skinning the animals? I was under the impression that it was the Elder who’s son had died.
Jenny*