I’m in complete agreement with your post, but in response to this one sentence I’d like to introduce you to our good friend, Silicon.
I saw the movie today & actually, I liked it - I even enjoyed the twist: I felt that the idea of the “elders” using such extreme measures to protect “innocence” that wasn’t quite so innocent was an interesting and creepy topic: They instilled in their children & grandchildren the same fears of violent death that they had while living in NYC - only they knew that they were the ones creating the bogeymen, all out of some warped dsire for innocence and safety. I’d have been pretty ticked off if the villagers were actually modern-day trees due to be cut down/ if the monsters had been real/ etc. I’d have viewed such an ending as cheesy or lazy, in that order. On the other hand, many people seem to be bummed not about the ending as it stands alone, but more about it as it compares to other Shyamalan endings. I’ve only seen one other Shyamalan movie (“Signs”) & can barely recall it; perhaps that’s why I was able to enjoy this one.
What was the whole deal with Ivy seeing Lucius’s “colour”? They never explained it in the movie, did they?
Well, I was conciously trying to say “molecule” and not “element”. And I did say “maybe”, as in “close to, if not true in actuality”. So there.
[Stalks off in a huff]
Thanks for the spoilers everyone…now I know I’m not going to see this film. But it did occasion one of Ebert’s great lines in his review. I may not be quoting verbatim, but he says that the characters “go below the one-dimensional to Flatland”. I love that.
I thought the kid’s book “Running Out of Time” did this plot pretty well. M. Night
S. should have based the script on that.
Maybe some people are, but I think the consensus is that it’s just a dumb twist.
Okay, thirty-one times: there’s no good reason to think that the creatures in Signs were aliens from another planet. Your logical objections are based on your own assumptions, not on information actually provided by the script.
(I’d like to get Shyamalan in a small room and ask him about this, though. If he seriously meant for the creatures to be aliens, then he’s got some ‘splainin’ to do.)
No doubt somebody will write to Roger Ebert to point out that Flatland is, in fact, two-dimensional and that it would therefore be a step up from one-dimensional. Also, I just disagree with his assessment in this case. Ebert’s an intelligent, thoughtful reviewer, but sometimes it’s as if we saw two different movies. (Also, sometimes he gets mixed up about basic plot elements.)
All in all, I’d consider this film a misfire from Shyamalan. But every writer/director has them (and there are plenty who produce nothing but crap). I’m sure he’ll do better work in the future.
I liked it also. I noticed some possible problems with the origin and maintenance of the secret, but movie time is limited and explaining everything (if there is an explanation) would have slowed the movie. The acting was good and the cinematography did a good job of supporting the story. I did not get bored and thought the movie moved well. I did not guess the two twists, but I have not seen Unbreakable or Signs. I do believe that there was a least one hint at the second twist. The only time I went into “questioning logic mode” was when it took so long between the announcement of Ivy to the presence of Ivy.
What reason is there to think that they’re not aliens? At it’s most vague, I’d think you’d simply look at the aliens as one giant MacGuffin, but I don’t see any reason to think they’re other than what’s presented. Everyone in the movie thinks they’re aliens, and no other option is presented, so why not?
Well, okay, then, if they’re not aliens, that still doesn’t degrade their stupidity for trying to attack without any way to block out the water. In fact, it makes them more stupid because then they should be more than aware that water hurts them (what with living on a planet that is predominantly covered in it) and that they should take precautions against it. Runnin’ around naked won’t protect anything.
Yeah, what he said!
I’ve never heard that they might NOT be aliens in “Signs”. What else would they be? They’re not terrestrial, that’s for sure. Hey, that’s a great point I just thought up. They are by definition not from Earth because of their problem with water. There’s no place on earth that they would have been able to evolve away from water. Are we to assume there’s a great cave miles underground without water?
Even aside from that, there are the points that they can do some feats of strength sometimes, but not when it’s inconvenient to the plot, and we still have to deal with the fact that they showed up just when all the spaceships did.
Since no one has linked to it yet…here’s a Pit discussion of whether the creatures in Signs were extraterrestrial or not. Take the debate there so we don’t have to muck up the discussion of one terrible movie by discussing another terrible movie. 
I agree with you on everything there. Before I saw Sixth Sense, I thought it would be a horror movie, same with Signs. Neither really are, and definitely neither is The Village.
Another thing I really like was the way he revealed the information. He had Ivy go to the shed, then cut ahead, and then in the next scene revealed what she saw.
I also like the way they show… the part where Lucious is stabbed
Re: Signs, I get tired of everyone saying “they are so stupid because they are going to a planet with a lot of water.” Everyone says that, and always say it like they’re saying something original.
Maybe the aliens really didn’t know? Maybe they got faulty survey information? Maybe once they left their ships they couldn’t communicate what they found, and it wasn’t rainy? Maybe the water in the air wasn’t enough, it had to be splashed onto them? Maybe they did have umbrellas, but you didn’t see them?
Maybe the water really was contaminated? (that last one I don’t really belive)
I think the whole thing makes the movie all the more interesting.
Well, I liked the movie for its look and mood, and I thought Adrien Brody’s Joaquin Phoenix’s and Bryce Howard’s characters were well done, far more so than the ‘Elders’ more seasoned actors.
Yeah, I could see the twist coming from a mile off, even without the speculation. I mean . . .When someone’s been stabbed in the gut, and it didn’t kill them outright, and you’ve stopped the bleeding, your next worry is infection. Village or town, in 1895 a doctor would have been helpless. If Ivy was sent to fetch back a antibiotic known to the doctor, it had to be at least 1920 when they sealed themselves in.
Other than that, I had to wonder at the planning. When they settled, why didn’t they bring some draft animals with them? The truck gardens you could see around the settlement are fine for vegetables, but raising enough wheat or barley entirely by hand for some fifty-odd people would be a big job, indeed.
DD
I see the point of the Pit thread, but I feel compelled to reply here, where the discussion of the Signs aliens has sprung up.
The aliens have presumably been doing recon for over a decade, if we can assume that the crop circles are all their work. This means they DID know about the water problem, but went around anyway.
Am I supposed to believe that they have invented giant spaceships, presumably faster-than-light travel, but couldn’t use encrypted radio to communicate with the mother ships?
They had umbrellas but we didn’t see them? If you’re going to forcibly occupy an area where one of the most common and thrown about chemicals dissolves your skin, you don’t just carry an umbrella, you go in a sealed suit or pod/vehicle. Anything else is just asking to womped.
I also like the point about needing animals to farm efficiently, and the one about antibiotics. Am I to understand that the was sent out of the preserve to get antibiotics?
I do have to say that there are three major plot holes (or maybe just unanswered questions) that bother me about The Village.
[spoiler]The first one was already mentioned…where did all of the other people in the village come from? Are we supposed to believe that everyone in the village are either the group of “Elders” that founded the village or their children? It seems that we are supposed to believe that only the Elders know that the creatures are fake, but weren’t there other adults there in the village? It seems from the photograph of the group of the Elders “pre-village” that they must have started the village in the 60’s or maybe early 70’s, so there is a potential there, if several of them had children, to populate the village with their own offspring, I suppose, but that just seems…weird. Oh, well.
Another thing that bothers me is this: why in the world would the head elder send his blind daughter off into the woods to get the medicines? Yes, there were supposed to be the two escorts that turn tail and run, but even so, why would he not go himself, if all he needed to do was find the ranger station and get the medicine? If it is him paying off the government to establish a no-fly zone over the preserve, and apparently paying off the head ranger as well (the ranger played by M. Night Shyamalan, definitely notices Kevin the junior ranger gathering medicine and must guess what he’s up to, but says nothing except to warn him not to get into conversations), then I would think that he would be known at least to the head ranger and could easily get whatever medicine he needs without really risking anything. As for the idea that he ‘took an oath’ never to go back, that’s all well and good except he gives an impassioned speech to the other elders about why he needs to let Ivy go get the medicine and so forth and they pretty much agree and say, “if it ends, it ends.” Great! Now stop your daughter from wandering in the woods and possibly falling into pits or getting lost, and go get the freaking medicine!
This brings up the last plot hole/question: Why in the world would these supposedly smart people decide NOT to have modern medicines or an easy means to procure them? Certainly if they are wily enough to convince everyone that there are monsters roaming the woods, they could find a way to have someone from the outside provide medicine if it was needed. Maybe they would have set up an arrangment by which one of them could leave a note in a predetermined spot on the other side of the fence and the rangers could lower some medicine over the fence, or like I said before they could just send the leader to the ranger station to get some. Or maybe, since they were so good at hiding the costumes from everyone (except from Noah, apparently!) they could have used the forbidden shed to house a two-way radio or CB or phone or something. I mean, come on! Since they are controlling everyone’s perception in the village, there is no reason why they couldn’t have explained the presence of modern medicines easily as it just being the way things are. The only way the absence of medicines or a means to get medicines make any kind of sense is if the Elders all agreed to live COMPLETELY as if they were in their chosen time period with no reliance on ANY modern things, which again doesn’t make much sense; they were trying to get away from the evils of crime that proliferate in modern society, not to get away from scientific advances or proper medicine.[/spoiler]
But as a friend of mine said after the movie, “if people in the movies utilized common sense, we’d have a lot of really boring movies.”
You forgot the worst two:
[spoiler]1) I’m perpetrating a massive hoax on the kids in my village, trying to scare them. The other adults are helping me out. Nobody’s doing any harm. Except then someone starts bloodily killing wild animals and making it look like it’s our hoax creatures doing it. And then someone bloodily kills our livestock and makes it look like it’s our hoax creatures doing it. Eh. I’m not concerned. They’ll probably stop.
- I’m living in a small village. One of the villagers is bugfuck violent crazy. We have a prison we’ll keep him in. And we’ve got these costumes of really scary monsters that we use to threaten the kids with death. I know! Let’s hide one of the costumes in the prison![/spoiler]
The movie’s mood was fantastic, no doubt. The performances were great. The visuals were stunning. The story blew chunks.
I really think that at this point Shyamalan needs to find a writer to team up with, and needs to give the writer serious veto power. He’s got areas in which he’s brilliant, but he’s also got George-Lucas-sized flaws.
Daniel
I don’t see how MNS can get a rep of twist endings. Of the two movies of his I’ve seen, “Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable”, neither had a twist at all. In fact, “Unbreakable” was all “anti-twists”, that is, stuff to explain things that are just not believable. Ugh. But “Sixth Sense” was still a nice enough movie. How much longer can he feed off that corpse?
Actually, The Sixth Sense is well known as the movie that brought back The Twist Ending.
Of course it brought it back with a twist that was banned by editors in every major literary market as too cliched and obvious because it was beat into the ground in old movies and stories and kind of pathetic to boot, but then I guess a lot of movie goers never really read or saw any older movies or TV shows.
When someone above said he had one good movie so what are the other two people were thinking was good, I was still wondering what the one good movie was. Of course I bet I would have liked The Sixth Sense more if it didn’t have the “twist” revelation at the end as if the viewers wouldn’t figure it out. Some of the earlier scenes were very effective and the whole movie would have been more effective to me if it wasn’t framed as just a huge set up for something that was pretty obvious. If the kid had just told the guy early on and the movie was about him accepting it, it would have worked a lot better, in my mind.
My main complaint is that the movie was dishonest to viewers, purely to be dishonest to viewers rather than true to the characters. For instance:
[spoiler]Why did the headstone at the beginning of the movie list the dates as in the late 1800s? The elders know the real date, and the children wouldn’t know the difference.
Why the stilted speech? It was as if the Village was nothing more than an elaborate game of make-believe and playing house to the elders, rather than a genuine new community. With the added benefit of making the audience more liable to believe that it really was the 1800s.
Why on earth would the elders stage a creature attack on the wedding day of the leader’s eldest daughter? Why not let her have a happy reception and celebration? Moreover, which elders were not at the wedding reception? I thought I saw all of them there.[/spoiler]
Mood was good, story was crap.