joyce (joyce) wrote,
joyce
joyce

So, we watched The Village, which I'd somehow not managed to see when it came out in the theater, unlike everyone else in the free world. Since it's an M. Night Shyamalan movie, you know there's going to be a twist of some variety, and I'd actually managed to avoid any spoilers about it. (I did the same thing with The Sixth Sense, seeing it like a year after it was out on video, and carefully avoiding spoliers. I liked it a lot more than The Village, incidentally.)

I didn't dislike the movie itself; it was well done (beautifully, in places) and I cared about some of the characters and it was suspensful enough in places that I was hiding behind a blanket, waiting to see what happened (unlike Signs - I jumped in a few places, but it wasn't the outright scary it'd been billed to me.) I disliked some of the people in the movie, and I really disliked the idea behind the whole thing. If the notion is to leave the world because you want to create a better life for you and your family, then how the bloody hell do you do that by leaving behind things like modern medicine and going into a world where a septic cut can kill you? If you can invent a world where your children believe that red cloaked creatures are going to harm them if they cross a perimeter into the woods, then surely you can create a world where medical supplies just magically appear once a month or so (having a party from the inside who's in on the secret meet those from the outside who are at the fence or something)? Why put your children that you love so much at risk like that? And besides that, if you want to leave behind a world filled with fear and danger, why the heck would you create a world filled with fear and (percieved) danger for your children? Is living in a world where you're afraid of crossing an imaginary line in the woods because you're afraid of "those of whom we do not speak" really any different than this world where we have other things to be afraid of, even if the threat to the village wasn't actual?

Jeff pointed out that for the kind of life these people wanted, that they had to do it all-or-nothing. And I guess that's what's bothering me about it, because I don't like all or nothing things. And I'm sure part of the point of the movie is to make people ask questions like this, but... still. Meh. It kind of made me splutter a bit.

So, in short, lovely movie, but the premise made me twitch.
Tags: media:movies
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