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DVD The Village (Full Screen Edition) - Vista Series
Even when his trademark twist-ending formula wears worrisomely thin as it does in The Village, M. Night Shyamalan is a true showman who knows how to serve up a spookfest. He's derailed this time by a howler of a "surprise" lifted almost directly from "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim," an episode of The Twilight Zone starring Cliff Robertson that originally aired in 1961. Even if you're unfamiliar with that Rod Serling scenario, you'll have a good chance of guessing the surprise, which ranks well below The Sixth Sense and Signs on Shyamalan's shock-o-meter. That leaves you to appreciate Shyamalan's proven strengths, including a sharp eye for fear-laden compositions, a general sense of unease, delicate handling of fine actors (alas, most of them wasted here, save for Bryce Dallas Howard in a promising debut), and the cautious concealment of his ruse, which in this case involves a 19th-century village that maintains an anxious truce with dreadful creatures that live in the forbidden woods nearby. Will any of this take anyone by genuine surprise? That seems unlikely, since Emperor Shyamalan has clearly lost his clothes in The Village, but it's nice to have him around to scare us, even if he doesn't always succeed. --Jeff Shannon
Review(s): DVD The Village (Full Screen Edition) - Vista Series
Waste of time and/or money
The movie itself is boring like few, and toward the end you'll realize it wasn't even half of what you probably expected it to be. If you haven't seen it, you haven't missed anything at all; if you were thinking about buying it, save some time and money, do yourself a favor and look for something else.
Village of incredible wusses
This is hands-down one of the stupidest movies I've seen in years. It has a monstrously improbable, one-trick pony plot, over-the-top acting, stilted, horrible dialog, and passes, by turns, through unintentional humor and excruciating tedium. Its characters are maddeningly passive, totally self-absorbed, and frightened of their own shadows, and it's impossible to care what happens them. The picture is, however, pleasant to watch -- ideally with the sound turned off.
It's clear that the sort of small community depicted in The Village -- which has no modern conveniences and is completely isolated from the outside world -- could, at best, exist just above the subsistence level, and that practically all their waking hours would be devoted to toil and sweat.
Yet no one ever seems to do any work here. All they do is sit around talking and throwing festivals and preparing for a wedding and dining communally as if every day was Thanksgiving. They also spend a lot of time spooking each other with tall tales of creatures beyond the forest who shall not be spoken of (though they talk about them all the time), and cowering from perceived dangers in basements -- like frightened school children who hide under the blankets at night. Their passivity in the face of danger is maddening, and it's clear that a community like this couldn't have survived a week in the 19th Century -- or at any other time, for that matter.
I suppose The Village, among other things, is a distant (and highly watered-down) ancestor of one of Hawthorne's insular, ghoul-haunted communities, but without backbone, plausibility, moral imagination, grit, heart, soul, or anything else really, except a desire to pander to the LCD by offering up innocuous tripe with a predictable and, worse, highly-derivative plot that was just barely capable of sustaining the tension throughout the half-hour Twilight Zone episode the film ripped off.
Though it probably would have been better to shelve this project rather than film it, one can see much better ways to have pulled it off. For example, instead of building up to the anticlimactic revelation of the telegraphically obvious plot twist, why not instead let the audience in on the gimmick at the beginning, then show a dogged and brutal generational struggle between the elders who are trying to keep the secret against the children who will no longer be spooked by ghost stories and the crude contrivances they use to keep them in bondage? (As for the "crude contrivances", surely any writer worth his salt would have realized the only plausible reasons to scare the community out of its wits would either be as a practical joke in the context of comedy, or to demoralize and destroy the community in a drama.)
Better yet, why not acknowledge the plot as the comedy it really is, and milk it for all the belly-laughs it's worth? See, the elders are well-invested and have credit cards that keep the idle community well-stocked with goods, but they still maintain the pious charade that the gods are sustaining them in exchange for not trespassing the bounds of the forest where the gods reside. Eventually the kids get so bored living in this idle utopia they venture to the outside world, then come back and tar and feather the elders for pulling the wool over their eyes for so long. Or something like that.
Or what about this: a group of like-minded individuals decide to escape the world and build a community in the wilderness, but quickly discover that it's no picnic. This could either be a comedy or a drama.
Or why not just do an adaptation of Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance?
Or perhaps a less unintentionally humorous way could have been found to compare and contrast the values and survival strategies of the 19th Century against the modern era.
Unfortunately, that would have been impossible since it's clear this director doesn't have a clue about what living in the 19th Century was like.
I suppose an apologist for The Village might be inclined to see it as an allegorical fable, but in that case what is the message here?
Maybe the real message of The Village is that the time is ripe for this director to stop relying on gimmicky plots that shamelessly pander to the LCD.
Waste of my time
I fell almost fell asleep in the theater, this movie gives the name "boring" a new meaning. The director did his best to completely make this movie soooooo stupid...man waste my 9 bucks
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