Great concept, boring movie

Rating: 3/10 (2 August 2004)

I was excited to see "The Village"...I went into the theater knowing nothing about it except that it was directed by M. Night. Since I appreciated his previous efforts, especially "The Sixth Sense", I was eager to see this film.
I came out of the theater feeling disappointed. While the idea for the movie was interesting, the actual movie was beyond dull. The majority of the movie was filled with unrelated filler material. The Ivy and Lucious affair came out of nowhere. They seemingly had no relationship, then they began to talk about getting married? And why did they spend time with the storyline about Lucious and Ivy's sister? It was completely unrelated.

I understand that films such as this are building up to SOMETHING...and I find myself getting ansy waiting for the twist. It's unfortunate that throughout the duration of the movie, I impatiently waited for the twist, as opposed to enjoying every moment of the movie. When the twist occurred, I wasn't very shocked...I was just thinking, "Oh. Okay." instead of "OH MY GOD, WOW!"
Another irksome quality of this movie was Ivy's hair. All of the other women had long hair, tied into braids or buns. Ivy, on the other hand, had short-ish curly hair and it looked like it had a lot of mousse in it. It looked wrong for their culture, and especially for a blind girl who wouldn't manicure her own hair in that fashion. They could have easily taken a little bit of extra time to make her hair more appropriate.
This screenplay could have been shaved of about an hour of its content and made an interesting episode of "The New Twilight Zone", or something to that effect. I didn't think it deserved a spot on the big screen, and the idea certainly did not need to be flushed out to a full length feature film.

You can analyze anything deeply and come up with astonishing conclusions...however, I don't feel that there was any strong allegory in this film. It was supposed to be creepy and it did not deliver.