Knowing The Ending Might Actually Improve Your Enjoyment Of This Movie

Rating: 4/10 (27 February 2005)

A couple of weeks ago I was part of a family get together and like all family get togethers boredom rapidly set in , so one night my sister rented a couple of DVDs* with one of the films being the horror movie THE VILLAGE . " Ah " I piped up " I know the ending of this and it's not a horror movie " and promised not to tell anyone the twist ending . The titles came up and my sister asked who the director was as M Night Shymalan rang a bell . I explained that he was the writer/director of THE SIXTH SENSE ( Overrated ) and UNBREAKABLE ( Brilliant movie ) . About half an hour later my sister asked if anyone was still able to follow it and at this point my brother admitted he'd seen it at the cinema and it does pick up .
This sums up everything that's wrong with THE VILLAGE - Imagine if you have no idea who Shymalan is and you're expecting a horror movie watching this will be a dire ordeal . It's makes a snails pace look like a speed OD in comparison . We're treated to a series of sequences that on the surface make little sense like people burying red flowers in the ground . This all might make sense after the ending is revealed but what ruins the movie - Even if you know the ending - is the editing , the scenes jar without any sort of flow and as many people have pointed out this feels like a twelve hour movie cut down to a two hour movie with a lot of important scenes cut out . For example we see an attack by the mythical creatures then there's a jump cut to the next day which is very disjointed ,it's not well into the film that it's revealed that Ivy is blind when surely it would have been obvious at the start . Little things like that leads me to believe there's been large chunks cut out of the narrative along with characters that seem to be underdeveloped . And on top of all this the director insists on shooting several scenes in slow motion as if the movie isn't already slow paced enough
! !!!! SPOILER !!!!
As for the ending where it's revealed that the village is part of the 21st century and has been built by people wanting to escape the violence of modern day America it's by no means as clever as the endings of THE SIXTH SENSE or UNBREAKABLE . There's also a lack of internal logic to this . For example if the younger villagers believe they're living in the 19th Century then why do they wear 19th century clothes ? If they were wearing flares and tie dye T-Shirts they'd still believe they were living in the 19th century if that's what they've been conditioned to believe wouldn't they ? The characters also have odd sounding 19th century speech patterns . Again why would people not knowing what century it was have to speak in 19th century speech patterns ? They could easily use 21st century speech patterns which would make the dialogue easier to understand . Ah but that might make the audience cotton on to the fact that this isn't a 19th Century village after all , the whole film revolves around the twist that it's the 21st Century . As many , many people have pointed out similar ideas have been done much better in a third of the running time in THE TWILIGHT ZONE and without a doubt THE VILLAGE is Shymalan's weakest movie
* Just for the record COLLATERAL was the other movie we watched that night