I actually really liked it...

Rating: 10/10 (30 July 2004)

Contains Spoiler!! Haha I don't see why people are being so harsh with this movie...I loved it. I mean yeah, it wasn't a shock horror movie such as (Texas Chainsaw or Scream or any teen slasher movie) ...it was a thinking, psychological thriller commenting on how fear and imagination co-exist and how imagination creates fear that is or is not really there. For example...the sounds from the woods...they were just regular forest activity...but when told of the horrors of the woods people make them out to automatically be produced by some demon or creature that lives there. It's all in our minds. And that's what M. Night is toying with. He is toying with our mind...creating tense tense and scary situations instead of having a masked murderer run out and chop peoples heads off. He pulls his punches and only uses the surprises jumpy scenes to further mess with the audience...leaving them feel like it could happen at any time. They way he filmed each scene too...many times panning back the camera a bit and filming from a distance so that something could run in front of the camera at any moment...brilliant. I've heard a lot of mixed opinions about the ending too...haha i really liked it a lot. I love twist endings and I love movies that do not always take the logical path. I've read some pretty absurd statements out there already that people claim they guessed the ending 15 minutes into the movie...impossible, unless you cheated or read hints online that made you guess. I wanted the twist to hit hard and i wanted to be completely shocked by what it could be...I made sure I didn't read anything or even check anything about this movie up online. The only hints I had were the previews I saw on TV.
How could you have honestly known (!SPOILER!, by this point though..if you're reading this..you probably already know) if you didn't have any outside help that it was set in the current times. I thought it was great. It basically switched genres in mid movie...going from a horror/thriller to, in a sense, an almost science fiction approach. (Note: Science Fiction is something that could possibly happen even if extremely implausible, Fantasy is something that could never ever happen) People need to expand their imaginations a bit more...think laterally. Sure you could sit through and eventually I'm sure you'll find some way that the situation their in could not have happened or that something hinted the twists, yeah, have fun with that. But, remember, movies are to entertain.
I must say one last thing though, if you didn't understand the ending you missed the whole entire point of the movie. This movie was about imagination creating fear that wasn't there to begin with...and that's exactly what M. Night conveyed by twisting the ending. He made you believe, such as the people of the village believed, that there were horrors out in the woods that we should be frightened and scared of and that we should fear...but in the end we had nothing to fear. There wasn't anything out there...it had all been in our minds. The only actual real fear was when Noah was trying to kill Ivy. That was actually happening, it wasn't a set up that time. And it was interesting, and perhaps the other main point of the movie, that a town created entirely for the soul purpose of keeping these children innocent and away from harm had evil within itself too. There are irrational people out there no matter where...you can't escape them. Evil can come within as well. Being a filmmaker myself...I would have loved to make a movie like this. I would have loved to toy with the audience this much, would have loved to have the guts to totally go out on a wing for the ending. I thought it was just plain brilliant.