Actually, I love the movie. The ending is not exactly mind-blowing, but it is cool and I for one didn’t see it coming. I like Shaymalan movies for the way he directs: the deliberate pacing; the reserved, mannered performances he gets from his actors; the gradually building tension. Shaymalan knows how to tell a good story, and I love how carefully crafted his films are. I can see how the holes in his plots frustrate people, but I see his movies as fairy tales about elemental fears and emotions; trying to figure out where the lamp oil comes from is beyond irrelevant.
Clearly a fundamental difference between us. If someone presents me with a mystery or a fantasy in which reality is askew, it bugs the heck out of me if it’s not well thought-out and consistent, at least to the point of eliminating obvious howlers. This is why Signs really annoyed a lot of Dopers, and why I had problems with The Village. even though i love other aspects of Shyamalan’s work, these are deal;-killers for me.
On the other hand, when it all hangs together, I’m in awe. Probably because it’s so rare.
(Doc Ostrow:[ A creature that can take 30 Billion Electron Volts without disintegration] is a physical impossibility. It would have to be made of solid nucear material. It’d sink of its own weight to the heart of the planet…It must have been renewing its structure from microsecond to microsecond.
– Forbidden Planet
Damn! That’s the way to do SF and the unknown)
This brings up one of my tips for folks setting up utopias. If you’re going to have a utopia, and you’re going to have scary monster suits in the utopia, and you’ve got a mentally retarded, violent son, and you’re going to lock up your mentally retarded, violent son in a cabin, be sure to store your monster suit in that cabin. Nothing bad could possibly come of this plan.
Daniel
Probably. 
I do really admire a well-constructed fantasy world that stands up to scrutiny; but I’m also quite willing to forgive holes in the right circumstances. Dissecting the plots of Signs or The Village for inconsistencies strikes me as abut as useful as dissecting the plot of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” for inconsistencies.
How about the correct answer is “who gives a shit about gas lamps”? It’s a movie.
Yeah, the twist at the end was fairly predictable. But it was a decent story nevertheless and that’s what counts.
Now if I were the director, I would really throw a freakin twist in the end there. Like the village is actually part of a futuristic zoo or the monsters are actually real and wipe out the village or everyone in the village is a robot. Something that leaves the audiance saying “what the fuck!?”
What the hell am I, a mongoose?
:: experimentally lunges at passing cobra, misses, gets bitten on the hand ::
Nope, not a mongoose. But I also liked The Village, and I agree that the movie is more enjoyable if you go into it not expecting a great revelation a la The Sixth Sense. I think more than anything else it’s an (admittedly sometimes heavy-handed) fable on the current situation with the war on terror.
Now if you’ll excuse me I’m getting a little dizzy and my left hand appears to have swollen to the size of a grapefruit.
But at least you got to mutter “you miserable cowardly cocksuckers” at her two companions when they abandoned her, miserable cowardly cocksuckers that they were.
And don’t get me started on her father, either. If I ever meet him through some bizarre transuniversal transport thing, he’s getting *such * a beating.
I don’t think you’re supposed to like the MCCs who send the blind redhead into the woods. Or, for that matter, her father. We’re meant to judge them poorly.
Did I mention that
[spoiler]
you’re meant to think that the Elders are scum?
And that they’re a Bush admnistration allegory?
[/quote]
This is about how I approach M. Night’s movies, too, although I’m a little more insistent on some basic level of realism. I was totally blown away by The Sixth Sense, a well-crafted ghost story with both a heart and a mind. Good stuff. Unbreakable had its moments, but was not as good as its predecessor. Signs? Meh. I was ready to like it, but couldn’t get over the water-allergic aliens coming to a place like Earth. Haven’t seen The Lady in the Water and, judging from the reviews, I haven’t missed much.
I was willing to suspend (most of) my disbelief with The Village, and thought it hung together pretty well. Great atmosphere and interesting premise. My biggest question was whether the village was big enough (i.e. had enough genetic diversity) to keep going beyond a generation or two. I still kinda doubt it.
I thought of that too, but I don’t think it’s a valid criticism. Do you really think William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, & the other elders had given it that much thought? Again, I don’t believe we’re meant to think well of the elders. They were dreamers in the worst sense: they thought they could turn back the clock to an idealized time and in so doing shield themsleves from all unpleasantness, all the while forgetting that the past wasn’t nearly so wonderful as their dreams made it, and that the evil in the world comes from inside people’s hearts, not from an external agent. They were always just one bad winter or other incident from things going south.
I knew zero about it-- hadn’t even heard of it when we rented it at the suggestion of a sibling (we’d been out of the country for a year) and I liked it a lot. It started off feeling like a fairy tale being narated (so suspension of disbelief was easier-- I never got the feeling that this was supposed to be the REAL 18th century so lamp oil be damned).