Wow, where to begin

Rating: 1/10 (6 August 2004)

It's a known fact that M. Night Shyamalan can make some truly scary movies. The Sixth Sense echoed Alfred Hitchcock, a comparison that is not tossed around lightly. Signs was an exercise of letting one's imagination fill in the horrific gaps of what the audience cannot see. But Shyamalan's latest outing dives into a new type of scary: That a filmmaker with such an accomplished resume, two Oscar nominations, and a very profitable background could create a film so bad that the audience would be more likely to find amusement hitting their heads against the seats in front of them in this movie.
The plot is sketchy at best, but "The Village" is about a village of people in an indeterminate setting have become threatened by mythical creatures in the woods who are beginning to invade the town. Meanwhile, Joaquin Pheonix says that he wants to venture into the woods to find some medicine from the outside towns. Pheonix and newcomer Bryce Dallas Howard share moments of fleeting love that is never truly defined. For that matter, neither is any of the characters' motivations. We are essentially watching people go through the actions, but the audience is left in the dark.
So essentially, Shyamalan is trying to show the dangers of hiding from one's past, but the story is so disjointed and poorly told that his message and story get lost in the chaos. A few more drafts or at least a ghost writer or two could have saved this story from incoherence, but it seems that Shyamalan saw this as his baby and wanted complete control over it. Since the film is now his own, he becomes the one who is to blame. Shyamalan should have known better.
This movie brought to mind an interesting riddle, what's a bigger crime: wasting a talented ensemble cast or framing a movie in a way that disconnects the audience from all attachment to the characters? We have Joaquin Pheonix, Sigourney Weaver, Adrien Brody, William Hurt, Brendan Gleeson and the promise of a newcomer in Bryce Dallas Howard, yet this movie proves that no matter how much talent you may have, if there's no motivation to work with, no clear goals of the characters, and lines so out of place and distractingly bad, talented actors becomes no more than a mannequins for the director to manipulate. Shyamalan should have known better.
Obviously, there is a typical twist at the end of an M. Night Shyamalan has become expected, whether it be "I see dead people", "They call me Mr. Glass", or "Swing away," relying on such twists can be a treat for an audience, but "The Village proves that relying on twists too much can make the audience realize they are on shaky ground and make them watch every step the movie takes. By Shyamalan's fourth film, the audience already begins to expect such an ending and instead begin looking at clues instead of the film itself, which in the case of "The Village" may actually be a good thing, but in this case, the payoff is so juvenile that one expects it from a sixth grade creative writing paper rather than from the man who made us "keep the secret" of "The Sixth Sense." (You can find the twist in the paragraphs of this review) Shyamalan should have known better.
Directors carry most of the blame if the movie they make isn't clear or interesting to an audience and here, Shyamalan is the man to blame. He stages his shots so that we never see any reaction on the characters faces during critical moments in the film. And the staging of each of the actors is so dehumanized and impersonal that it does more to draw an audience away from a film than draw them in. If the atmosphere looks great, one can credit the greatest living director of photography: Roger Deacons and the always talented costume designer Ann Roth. But their efforts seems wasted as the photography or the costumes are never given the chance to breath on their own. Shyamalan should have known better.
Although, we could make the argument that Shyamalan needed a more accomplished film editor. People like Andrew Mondshein (The Sixth Sense), Dylan Tichnor (Unbreakable), and Barbara Tulliver (Signs) all knew how to handle Shyamalan's disjointed storylines and add a depth, using the cutaways to reactions. Here, Christopher Tellefsen is satisfied allowing the camera to hold on shots where the characters' backs are talking to the audience, never cutting away to show us reaction shots or giving the film a satisfying pace outside of sterile. If he had stuck with any of the other editors he'd worked with, the film might have worked better, but he chose not to. Shyamalan should have known better.
You'd be hard pressed to find an enjoyable moment in this whole film. Watching this movie, one gets the feeling that Shyamalan should have written a few more drafts, made the film more clear, made the characters relatable or at least allow the audience in on their thoughts. For a director who has already displayed his own sixth sense for showing a depth of character (all together now): Shyamalan should have known better.