Can I give it less than 1 out of 10?

Rating: 1/10 (4 November 2008)

'You bastard, Shyamalan' I said, leaning back into my seat in the cinema when the film concluded. Months later, I said the same thing as I violently threw the DVD case into the returns slot at my local Blockbuster store; a friend and I had re-hired it as a joke after seeing it at the cinema- we spent two hours hurling outraged profanity at the TV screen. This is not a joke; this movie is so astonishingly bad, it's hard to imagine how the script got the green light of approval to begin with! Thanks M Night Shyamalan. Way to take a great concept- people inexplicably killing themselves- and utterly destroy it. Terrible acting, cringe worthy side-gags, amateur cinematography, and the worlds worst plot since.... well, it's probably the worlds worst plot EVER.
Killer trees? Give me nuclear power plants... Give me disease... Give me terrorists... Give me killer bees... Give me any sort of vaguely believable explanation that the audience can just go along with it. But... EVIL TREES?
Shut the hell up Shyamalan, I'm confiscating your pen. Don't you ever put pen to paper and write another movie again, ever. How dare you expect me to sit through that film? On behalf of everyone who's watched your movies, we are TIRED of your 'attempted big twist' type story lines (aka Signs, Lady in the Water), each one more dreadful than the last. You don't have any skill any more- you're all dried up! So shut the hell up.
The actors were unnatural and wooden, the dialog was forced. Mark Wahlberg (RIP his career) plays a cheesy science teacher, with about as much acting skill & dimension as a dry plank of wood. He has a permanent expression of dazed confusion throughout the entire film, which was hard to miss given that there was a pseudo-suspenseful close-up of his head every two minutes while he delivered his barely convincing tone-deaf dialogue.
Zoey Deschanel was disappointing too. She played a pain-in-the-ass girlfriend of Wahlberg, and was constantly staring blankly into the mid distance with wide doe eyes. John Leguizamo appears also, but does little to help carry the film. Around half way through the movie, Wahlberg hammers the final nail into the coffin with a dreadful monologue as he tries to work out what is going on around them. From then on, everything goes from bad to worse (a scene springs to mind wherein Wahlberg has a conversation with a plastic plant). Other reviewers may claim that "the musical score was brilliant", but it certainly didn't stand out in any respect.
The producers definitely should have employed some twisted seventeen year old kids to come up with better 'gruesome death scenes', since that's what the audience was expecting. I imagine Shyamalan gets up in the middle of the night to throw up as he regrets filming it so poorly- I know I would. It's shoddy D-grade work that should have bypassed cinemas & gone straight to DVD. Oh, and "Shame on you Apple" for unsubtly plugging the iPhone halfway through.
If you hadn't picked it up already from the review, I utterly hated it from 2-minutes in onwards. If I had invested money in this film, I would be kicking the directors door down to get it back.
I doubt I will ever see another Shyamalan film again. Not because I choose to, but because I doubt any company will allow him make another.
Monumental failure.
-1 / 10