Tuesday, August 03, 2004

The Village Review

There might be one or two very mild spoilers in this review of The Village. Very mild.

I'm having a hard time formulating an opinion about Sham... Shamalan... er, you know who I'm talking about. Night's new movie, The Village. My initial reaction was mostly positive, but I'm inclined to love everything the man does.

All I can say is this. The Sixth Sense left me deeply unsettled and Signs left me euphoric. Unbreakable took a little while to grow on me, but nowadays, my opinion of that movie is almost entirely positive.

So maybe The Village will need to grow on me. There's lots of good stuff that I remember - the romantic relationship that was sweet and entirely believable, and several rather scary scenes. The technical stuff was superb - great photography, etc.

Here's where the mild spoilers begin.

There's some bad stuff too, though. The dialogue could be termed atrocious, though many will forgive this for plot reasons. One character that is built up to be very sympathetic, and then essentially disappears from the movie. There is at least one plot point that is left dangling, for no apparent reason. And one character acts in a way that should be far beyond his capabilities, though perhaps there is a subtle plot explanation for this that I've missed.

So I'm not sure. I'll have to chew on it a bit more.

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