The Village Reviews

Of the four films of M Night Shyamalan's that are panned as bad- The Village, The Happening, Lady in the Water and The Last Airbender- I thought The Village(having just finished re-watching it yesterday and was not sure what to make of it at first) was the least bad of the four, to me the other three are as bad as they're said to be.

I wasn't expecting to like it after so many uncharitable things both here and elsewhere and by how it was marketed, but I sort of did. It does look great with beautiful scenery and brooding cinematography and the score is very haunting, eerie quality about it. There are also some genuine jolts and poignancy in the first half, and The Village with a great concept does start off intriguingly.

The best thing about it though is the cast. William Hurt is nuanced and intelligent and Joaquin Pheonix is wonderfully stoic, but the biggest surprise was Bryce Dallas Howard, who was fantastic and quite moving here. There were however a few disappointments, and I say this as I consider these actors the most accomplished generally of the cast. Sigourney Weaver and Brendan Gleeson are great actors but underused and Adrien Brody comes across as wasted in a rather nothing role.

What let The Village down and from stopping it from being more than it had potential to be was that while M Night Shyamalan can have films where he is a master-storyteller(The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable) or where he is sloppy(2nd half of Signs, The Happening), he comes across as rather over-ambitious here. The story is so interesting at first, but the second half is let down by too many ideas, and some of them are wonderful ideas but underdeveloped.

Consequently the pace becomes more drawn out, the dialogue becomes clunky and apart from Howard I found myself indifferent to the characters by the end. And to top it all, the ending is ridiculous. All in all, not that bad but has a lot wrong with it in my opinion. 6/10 Bethany Cox

What a beautiful film! It is shot so perfectly with beautiful music and memorable characters. This is one of Shyamalan's best films. It is such a shame that this one did not get much oscar recognition like all his other latest films.

Always a huge fan of Shyamalan's style, and this one breaks rules. It's unique to Hollywood filmmaking. Underrated director.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The residents of a small rural village live in harmony, except for fear of the mysterious creatures in the woods beyond the village. Now the villagers believe that the alliance between them and the monsters has been broken.
Most people agree that this is where Shyamalan definitely went downhill. I may not have liked Signs, but at least it had potential to be a good movie. The Village, however, just flat-out fails.
First of all, the acting is just as wooden as Signs – except for Adrien Brody, who easily upstages everyone else. And I guess Shyamalan was trying to make the dialogue sound old-fashioned, but that's all it sounds like: an imitation of that dialect.
But perhaps my main problem with the movie is that it's slow! Painfully so! It feels ironed out to its hundred-minute length!
The opening scenes raise plenty of questions about where things are going to go, but the movie takes a long time to establish what its real focus is.
It's towards the end, however, that the movie hits rock bottom. The last half-hour is a constant barrage of weak twist after weak twist.
It's dull, boring, unfocused and just all-around tedious.

My rating: 35%

What makes difficult to review this movie is the fact that M. Night Shyamalan has now become the laughtingstock of the movie world (even though most of his movies are still financially successful) but we shouldn’t forget that when this movie was released, he was still a promising and highly regarded director. Anyway, many people think that it started to go bad for him with this movie but I don’t agree. In my opinion, it is with the awful ‘Lady in the water’ that his career went down the drain. Until then, all his movies were pretty decent, very well directed, nothing really mind-blowing but usually pretty entertaining (yeah, I’m not a fan of ‘The Sixth Sense’ which is one of the most overrated movies ever made in my opinion). This movie is not an exception. The directing was pretty awesome, really atmospheric which reminded me of Hitchock, there was a pretty cool cast (Bryce Dallas Howard, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Brendan Gleeson, Michael Pitt, Jesse Eisenberg) and they all delivered some solid performances. Unfortunately, as usual with Shyamalan, the story was rather disappointing. I mean, it was really entertaining and it managed to keep me on the edge of my seat until the end but, then, the twist (again!) kind of ruined the whole thing for me. I mean, for the 4th time in a row (‘The Sixth Sense’, ‘Unbreakable’, ‘Signs’), Shyamalan ended up the proceedings with yet another half-baked twist... Basically, in my opinion, the guy is a very talented director but a rather poor writer and if someone (good) would write his screenplays, we might end up with something interesting. Still, to conclude, if you forget the hype for a minute, it is actually a decent and entertaining thriller and it is definitely worth a look.