Village, The
Suggestion for the video blurb: A bad twilight zone episode fleshed into a highly suspenseful roller-coaster ride of a film.
I just saw The Village.
Someone needs to tell Shymalangadingdong his films are just fine without the novelty act.
Okay, after Signs came out I heard people bitching left, right, center, and left again, about the ending. Hated it. Loathed It. Stupid ending, blah blah blah. Personally I did not have a problem with the ending. Didn’t think it was a twist at all. The film was called Signs for crap’s sake – of course all those little insignificant things were gonna come back and play a big part in the finale. But anyways back to my point. I haven’t heard anyone bag this ending. And I don’t mean give it away – no one gave Signs away to me but they still conveyed they thought it was crap. I liked The Village – but I would have thought that if any of his film’s 'twists' were gonna be bagged it’d be this one.
I saw it coming a mile away, I have to admit/gloat. It was around about the fifth time a character did one of those seemingly innocuous 'I had a family member die a grisly, horrible, death back in the towns' speeches. And from that moment I knew we were in present day, and my mind started racing with worst-case scenario possibilities. I was really enjoying the film and it looked like it was about to take a wrong turn to shitsville Tennessee. I thought the worst.
Please, please be that the twist isn’t that The Village was actually a big television set and that it was a village full of Trumans – a reality show with a twist: everyone thinks it’s the nineteenth century!!! Nah, too wacky for DingDong.
And how I prayed that Blindy wouldn’t come out of the woods to find she had been living in Central Park or something and was now surrounded by all the craziness of modern society and BAM! End of film – Planet of the Apes (Tim Burton version) style.
Or even worse: The film becomes a hilarious fish out of water tale as a blind girl who thinks its 1854 has to learn how to live the life of a sassy modern day, single professional woman and find romance in the big smoke. But no, this film doesn’t star Kate Hudson so it can’t be something like that.
So with those thoughts running through my head you can understand that I then found it perfectly acceptable that they were actually a support group, sick of our violent society, funded by a billionaire, that went off and formed their own Waco cult - and for some reason had to pretend it was 200 years in the past. Makes total sense. Perfectly acceptable.
Okay, I lie. It didn’t sit with me that well. By the time Blindy ventured into the woods, what I was really hoping for most of all was that there would be a cunning double twist. That everything she was told about the monsters being fake was all lies by her father so she wouldn’t be scared on her journey. The lies were actually lies! Brilliant! Shymalangadingdong, you’ve done it again! Maybe this is the little boy in me but dammit – I wanted the monsters to be real. Real scary monsters in the woods. Now there’s a twist.
I admit the ending was handled pretty well for what it was – but his explanations for things had my eyes a-rolling."Gosh my dear, we really shouldn't have left that extra monster suit buried under the floorboards like that." Stupid. I dig that the big reveal came half-an-hour before the end, so it wasn’t going to be all 'Sixth Sensey', but it was like he thought, "Ah, crap. I gave the game away too early – better come up with one more scare for my fans," – logic be damned. Enter the retard in the suit.
“Oh, and in case you are sitting there in the audience thinking you are smarter than me, and finding plot holes big enough to build an entire village in, I shall put myself in a cunning cameo and explain everything quickly so no questions remain. Okay, are you ready…? Here goes. Ahem – planes can’t fly overhead. Well, actually that’s pretty much it. Convinced?”
The tension was what I believe we can now call Shymalangadingdong-esque. Excellent. Can’t touch Signs, mind you, but still riveting. The lack of camera movement seemed apt for the surroundings, and it only jarred when he was using what was virtually the same people-talking-by-the-side-of-the-house shot over and over. But everything was understated and simple like Joaquin’s character and the village itself.
It’s an unfortunate side effect of writing these reviews that the more I write and think and write, the more I get on a roll and the more critical I seem to get of a film. Case in point: The more I think about The Village the crapper it gets.
On second and third thought, his red herrings just don’t make sense. How do the creatures give out ungodly noises from the woods at all times of the day and night...um, why the elders did it! How? Doesn't matter. Who has stripped the animals and livestock of fur and skin and littered them around - one of the elders. Who? Doesn't matter.
I hate to be one of those people who pull apart films on things like, "How do they keep their gas lanterns running?" (as everyone seemed to be saying as we left the cinema) but in a case like this there are just so many that its hard to ignore. Why is it a problem to keep modern things like medicine around – none of the kids are familiar with the modern world, they wont know it's not supposed to exist in a 19th century setting. Of course it’s all so we too are fooled into thinking it’s set in the past, a contrivance which unfortunately seems to be Night's main priority here.
As for the retard - despite giving us one of the best scenes of the film (the stab scene - pretty brilliantly done) his film should have ended there. To have him in the suit was a bad, bad idea. A slightly better one would have been that a village elder wanting to protect their way of life was after her to stop her reaching civilization - that he/she would resort to violence and contradict the reason why they were there – that would have added something better than a retard in a suit. Or, HE COULD HAVE JUST MADE THE MONSTERS REAL!
Thematically it’s a nice film but not too deep. Not exactly a biting critique on violence in society, especially considering the times we live in. I still would do Sigourney Weaver though.