Excellent!

Rating: Null/10 (12 January 2005)

"The Village" is not a horror movie, so the first step to enjoying it is to stop looking at it that way. Now, granted, it WAS marketed that way, which was a very wrong and misleading thing to do, but seriously, GET OVER IT. View the film within its own context and you might actually like it. I think Touchstone Pictures really nailed themselves into the ground with the misleading ad campaign. Naturally, audiences were confused. But, do I have any sympathy for these audiences? No, not really. I was also mislead, but I managed to get past that and so did about 44% of the nation's critics who saw it. Out of about 183 reviews counted on Rottentomatoes.com, 80 of them were positive. So, there are SOME people actually do enjoy this movie. I actually found myself in disagreement with my favorite critic Roger Ebert on this one. He slapped the movie with a pathetic one-star rating. I'd like to believe that Ebert was simply angry at the time that he wrote the review. I have tremendous respect for Roger Ebert, I just disagree with him. In his July 30th update on RogerEbert.com he called the film a "shaggy-dog story" which is "a long, drawn-out anecdote ending with an absurd or anticlimactic punch line". To the average cynical American viewer, the end of the movie will be exactly this. But, for those of us who still have the ability to suspend our disbelief for two and a half hours, the climax of the movie will exist as, in the words of the critc Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, a powerful anecdote about "the ways fear can manipulate".
Some critics have argued that "The Village" is a distinctly political film and I think that if you really look hard enough, you can see it. However, that's the not the movie's real point. Just like M. Night Shyamalan says on the DVD, "The Village" is really just a love story, a "romance" movie. (Note the DIRECTOR of the film saying that it isn't a horror film). The relationship between the film's heroine, Ivy Walker, and the quiet, but dignified Lucius Hunt is a thing of beauty. Shyamalan directs their love affair with incredible restraint and talent. Watch the night-time "porch" scene featuring the two and prepare to have your insides melt. Seriously, it's gorgeous.
I'll close here with another excerpt from Travers' review of the film that I think is appropriate: "Know what? Let the film speak for itself. The Village, even when its step falters, is on to something more provocative than seeing dead people. Its power, unrelated to digital monsters, comes from the tension building inside the characters". (Rolling Stone - Jul 28, 2004).