To M. Knight: Just DIRECT movies--Don't write them!

Rating: 3/10 (15 June 2008)

I'm sure this isn't the first time you heard this.
There is no question that you can work a camera: this, like your other movies, are visually breathtaking.
I also don't doubt your ability to work actors: even the smallest of parts are well-developed and well-performed.
I also believe you have some interesting concepts: your stories seem to want to say something about the human condition.
Your weakness--that which is hurting your reputation as a premier director with each movie you put out--is that you can't execute these concepts in writing of quality that matches your direction skills.
I can surmise that your idea is what Ebert has said in his review: that nature is avenging itself on the human race by, what another writer said, emitting toxins that paralyzes man's capacity of self-preservation. If that was the idea, your writing didn't demonstrate that.
What I got from what you were writing was, at best, sophomoric and, at worst, silly: something in the plants is carried by the wind and it freezes people and forces them to KILL THEMSELVES?! That's up there with the horror radio play about the mysterious fog that turns people inside out--and that was intentionally funny.
Your writing also has some degree of sloppiness. The worst line in the movie was about how Julian's wife was going to "a town called Princeton" as though nobody in the Metro Philly area or beyond has ever heard of Princeton before. A small line, but sloppy, nonetheless.
If you want to bring ideas that what you characterize as "spiritual and. . .emotional perspective" into movies that have a mass-market appeal, which is how the studios are selling your movies, you need to write--or have someone else write--these ideas better so that they are better understood by a mass-market audience. Otherwise, you'll still have what I encountered last night--lots of people shaking their heads and angry at you for disappointing them.