Hacker Cinema
The Village
2004 · Film · 108 min
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
When a willful young man tries to venture beyond his sequestered Pennsylvania hamlet, his actions set off a chain of chilling incidents that will alter the community forever.
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9 comments on Hacker News
Yep. Signs was the movie that revealed to me my irrational fear of aliens walking in the distance for uncertain purpose.
Not joking, I am a big strong man but I was holding onto my girlfriend and shaking like a leaf during that movie.
Then the water scene happens and ruined the whole movie for me.
But I still get hairs standing up on the back of my neck if I think too long and hard about 7' tall aliens walking sideways in the distance. (Actually getting creeped out just typing this out).
I love it that there is a thought that can disturb me. I don't know where it comes from and I can't exactly control it.
Anyway, same thing with the Village. Great mood. Great cinematography. Great acting. Supernatural horror ominous period piece. So much well crafted build up that ended with an unfunny rehash of the ending of Monty Python's Holy Grail. Total cop out to the rest of the story. Unforgivable.
This film gets bashed often but I remember seeing it in the cinema when it was released and I absolutely adored it, and still do. I’ve ’inflicted’ it on several friends and acquaintances — and keep in mind I’m no M. Night Shyamalan fan having never seen Unbrekable and having walked out of the cinema midway through The Last Airbender that I hold to be one of the worst films ever. Anyway back to The Village: its scenery and ambiance were absolutely perfect. The twist was pure genius.
"Signs" was one of my favorite films of the 2000s, if you don't nitpick about the water. Suspenseful, well acted, leaves you guessing, eager for more.
Suffice to say, I eagerly anticipated "The Village" from the moment the first trailer dropped. The costumes looked cool. The colors, the creatures, the mood and the mystery.
I don't think I've ever left a theater quite so disappointed. The twist ruined what had been a magical experience for the better half of the film. I wanted the magic to endure, but I got slapped with a bad episode of "The Outer Limits".
Shyamalan remains a fantastic filmmaker for his hits, but this one hurt me. I don't wait for films anymore.
Do you have some evidence he was paid or just making stuff up?
AFAICT he was a pretty honest reviewer giving his own opinions. People have different tastes. Like some people like stinky tofu and others find it disgusting. Some people like The Village and some don't.
My sister likes everything, for example all episodes of Star Wars, 1 though 9. Whereas I only like 4,5,6 and find the rest to be horrible. She liked the latest "Haunted Mansion" so I watched and found it atrocious.
The original title "The Woods" is down in the footer. Apparently it was changed during production to avoid a clash with another film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Village_(2004_film)#Production
[Spoiler Alert]
I was at a "special invite." I remember this movie well because many of India's Bollywood whos-who were there. When the film ended, I came out and kept thinking, I wish the movie ended before the revelation, stayed on the cliffhanger, and didn't expose that the Village was "staged."
The ending made me feel like, "Duh! Was it all for nothing?"
These are all generally highly reviewed can lead to interesting discussions:
Gattaca - interesting take on genetics/DNA discrimination
Europa - hard science fiction, maybe a bit slow for a 12 year old
The Net - older movie but the concept of digital exile resonates today
City of Ember - post apocalyptic civilization that lives deep underground
First Man - dramatization of Neil Armstrong and the first moon landing (not realy "fiction")
Arrival - first contact situation, tastefully done
Contact - another first contact situation that explores how politics, skepticism, and fanaticism react
The Martian - easily as fun as the book
The Prestige - competing magicians in an industrial age setting
The Hunger Games - extreme class divide in a future setting
Jurassic Park - the original not the sequels
Stargate - wormhole travel to another planet (be careful with the TV shows though, SG1 on streaming has full frontal nudity and "not ok" scenes which were obviously not on the broadcast version and a total shock when we watched it as a family)
District 9 - has some graphic gore and language, so it might be 14+, but is an interesting look at aliens as refugees
Contagion - a look at how a pandemic could play out. Premiered before COVID.
The Maze Runner - interesting setting and look at group dynamics
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids - fun setting
The Village - scary movie with a sci fi twist
Galaxy Quest - comedy
Short Circuit - old movie that deals with AI sentience
Innerspace - another old one, but has some fun concepts
This is one of my favorites: About Shyamalan's "The Village":
"To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore.
"And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets."
You think that you are being so extreme that it is ridiculous.
Well, lawyers already went there: http://www.plotpatents.com/
"A Plot or Storyline Patent application seeks to patent the underlying novel and nonobvious storyline of a fictional story. Such protection is to be contrasted from the copyright protection of one of millions of possible expressions of an underlying storyline. The field of possible applications is broad, and may tentatively be split into an entertainment-advertisement dichotomy. The epitome of an entertainment application is an original, thought-provoking, often shockingly unique movie plot. Several potentially patentable features may have been found in the plots of, Memento, The Thirteenth Floor, Being John Malkovich, Butterfly Effect, The Game, Fight Club, The Matrix, Total Recall, The Truman Show, Minority Report, The Village, Groundhog Day, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, to name a few. The epitome of an advertisement application is one of the many thoughtfully hilarious Super Bowl commercials."