M Night Shymalan delivers a truly great and unique film

Rating: 9/10 (18 June 2008)

Caught the film in Santa Monica on Saturday night at an AMC theater! I'll say SPOILERS but I don't think there's anything I'm giving away in here...
M. Night Shymalan's elegant homage, in a certain way, to a beloved Hitchcock film***, is not for the faint hearted.
Luckily for me, I went to the film with a screamer. While she shrieked full throttle I was giddily laughing next to her.
This is the appeal of a Shymalan film...he manipulatively dazzles the audience with the unnatural both visually and with his dialogue...the screenplay brazenly disarms and charms at the same time that it delivers it's story and horror. At the heart of the film, through the maze the characters are forced to travel through to stay alive, is also a slow tuning in as though with a microscope on the heart of innocence, that individual potential, that humanity as a whole has lost in its relationship to our planet.
Like a spirit channeler, Shymalan has delivered a warning with this film and has managed to do so by filtering our current climate through his particular film-making genes to produce this incredibly unique film. Certain horrific images are familiar and I won't print in here why, but as we've experienced certain events in recent history, so Shymalan has re-invented their cause but the images viscerally make the viewer uncomfortable in terms of this film being a portent of our present not our future.
As far as the actors, Marky Mark...sorry Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel are a fine pairing in this story...there are moments especially of humor that are both original and precious or should I say priceless.
M. Night Shymalan truly delivers...but then...I've enjoyed all the films he's made so far and the Shymalan attackers with their claws out for his unDisneylike bad boy behavior should go pick on someone their own size...like Michael Bay...and let this guy make his own movies HIS WAY so there.
***I just want to add I think reading a lot of these reviews this screenplay was over the head of a lot of the people on here...I have a respect for a lot of my fellow filmmakers, but how off the mark can so many be to not respect the genius in this screenplay? As Hitchcock did earlier with THE BIRDS, Shymalan took what appears the most benign from our natural world and created horror and purposely used the B horror movie structure purposely to deliver something so much deeper...not only that, what he based this on is actually a reality (if you're into not sleeping at night thinking about this stuff check out James Rollins current book The Judas Strain)...the fact that our abuse of our planet could have dire consequences for us is the heart of the message...his choice of every word is with weight and thought because he's a master of his craft as a screenwriter...to compare Shymalan's work with anything else out there right now is ludicrous this is a a true original and his work demands thought to see through the layers I think he hit it out of the ballpark with this one.