An Insult to my Intelligence

Rating: Null/10 (19 February 2006)

The inhabitants of a small rural community maintain an uneasy truce with a menace in the neighboring woods and a greater terror beyond them in the new thriller by M. Night Shyamalan. I wanted to like this movie. I really did. The trailer and commercials were sufficiently creepy. If only the film lived up to half the promise, but it didn't. The film had potential, personified in the performance by Bryce Dallas Howard, who seems to be a legitimate talent. Unfortunately, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan failed to deliver the goods because he tried too hard to deliver the goods. I think the success of "The Sixth Sense" doomed him. Now he feels it necessary to outdo the shocking ending of that film. Therein lies the problem with "The Village. When you know, as everyone does, that it is a film with a "shocking" twist, you become distracted from the "drama" by the hunt for clues to the ending. At least I do. This time, however, one didn't need to hunt too much. Considering the film's setting, I thought the "twist" had to be one of two things: It was either set in the present, or the village's inhabitants were prisoners in some sort of alien menagerie. (Both concepts were, I believe, exhausted by The Twilight Zone decades ago.) At the first glimpse of the monster, I correctly suspected the first option. As I considered the implications of that scenario, I grew increasingly angry. The scenario simply wasn't workable. I couldn't suspend my disbelief. Their society simply couldn't exist without contact with the outside world. For example, Phoenix worked as a blacksmith. That's nice, but where does he get the iron to create things? Do they mine it themselves? I didn't see any mines. Also, what about their clothes? They could certainly make it themselves if they had cloth, but where were the cotton fields? It'd be one thing if they were all wearing all wool clothing. The list goes on and on into absurdity. Also, all the elders keep a locked trunk with their "modern" items. Don't you think one of the children, out of natural curiosity, would have broke open one of the boxes and looked inside? Think about it. When you were growing up, didn't you look inside everyone old box in your home? A lock would only make you want to look into even more! No kid could resist! And what's up with all the phony "King James"-style talk? Why would the elders start talking like that? The youngsters who grew up in the community wouldn't know the difference between old fashioned and modern speech. That was a stupid and totally unnecessary. Ugh! This film was an insult to my intelligence. While I enjoyed some of his earlier films, I think it might be time to jump off the M. Night Shamalamading-dong bandwagon.