Clearly, M. Night has lost his mind.

Rating: 7/10 (1 March 2005)

The fact that this movie was allowed to be made is just unsettling. Let this be a lesson to all major film corporations: Just because you have a well-established writer/director, doesn't mean you can fully trust him.
Okay, first of all, the advertising for this movie is horribly deceiving. "The Village" being advertised as a horror movie is like getting a student to take "Advanced Calculus" by telling them it's "an exciting outer-space excursion to a land of rainbow-colored gnomes and chocolate-covered unicorns that's both fun and uneducational! No math involved!" It's neither fair, nor honest. I had seen ads starting back in February that got me and a lot of my friends anticipating this film. "Finally," we thought, "a movie that will live up to 'The Sixth Sense'." Boy were we wrong.
Then, there's the plot. This movie might as well have been a 2-hour documentary of an Amish community. Now I know this concept may seem WAY too action-packed for you to handle, but don't worry, M. Night uses vast movie-making powers to dull it down with unoriginal camera work, and what's more or less a total lack of a musical score. I'm sure you can imagine the exciting events that would take place in this setting: "Will Jebediah's cow give enough milk for his 17 sisters to make it though another week? Can Ezekial find love with his cousin, Mary, or will his father, Jacob, get to her first? Will this year's harvest live up to expectations? Tune in next fortnight to find out!!!" Then, of course, there's the obligatory 'holy crap I didn't see that coming now the whole storyline got turned upside down what's gonna happen not that I care' plot-twist that causes someone to take action and leave the village. Who could this be, you ask? Why the blind girl of course! Who better to send through a supposedly monster-ridden forest than a sight-less chick armed with a giant stick. Incredible writing here, folks! So now, after being bored for a good hour-and-a-half, we get to watch little Helen Keller run aimlessly through the woods with a hiking stick until she finally runs into a large brick wall. If you haven't left the theatre/turned off your TV/turned off your computer and deleted the illegally-downloaded piece of crap, you'd see the story deteriorate even further, as any respect you once had for Sham-aylan is lost, along with all sense and logic in the film.
In summary, this movie should contain a warning label on it reading "WARNING: This movie may induce boredom, drowsiness, and severe loss of intelligence. If watched in it's entirety, you may experience a profound feeling of being cheated out of a couple bucks and two hours of your life. Do not operate heavy machinery within a day of watching, as the over-whelming frustration and confusion you will feel when finishing it could cause you to lose focus, causing massive injury to yourself and others." If someone holds a gun to your head and yells "Watch 'The Village' or die!", then SERIOUSLY WEIGH YOUR OPTIONS!