Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/02/04/breakdown-of-the-budget-of-m-night-shyamalans-71m-movie-the-village.html
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I’ve generally liked his movies, but this one is not good.
I’m fairly certain I’m not the only one that figured it out WAY early in the film…
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If you’re gonna have the whole premise of your movie based around a single plot twist then the twist should at least make a little bit of sense.
If a group of people wanted to raise their families in an isolated agrarian community without exposing them to the evils of big-city life there are a lot of ways to do that, as countless subcultures past and present have demonstrated. There’s no reason to craft an elaborate conspiracy to make all the children believe that they’re living in the 19th Century. It’s not like the Amish or the Mennonites try to keep their kids from learning what year it is.
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Isn’t that part of the point? When you have a small group of people with more money and resources than sense, who believe they know better than everyone else, who are inclined to want to reinvent the wheel and remake society in a manner that meets their goals while fulfilling their need for control…this is what they (and the people under their control) get. 
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I recently watched Don’t Worry, Darling, which, in retrospect, seems like a combination of the premise of this film + extra misogyny + The Matrix.
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I’m one of the rare folks who actually liked The Village more than most of Shyamalan’s other films (except The Sixth Sense). But I look at it as three separate films that got compressed into one:
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The first is kind of a charming slice of life movie about this slighlty odd little community from apparently a previous century.
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The second is a film about a community beset by weird fey creatures they have come to cope with through elaborate practices and rituals.
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The third is a slasher thriller where the real threat is a family member.
Separately each was really intriguing to me. But combined all together, it was one too many twists. By the time the final twist about anachronism came about, I just didn’t care.
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There was a nice bit in Stone Forever about how do you record costs for Bikie gangs and drugs in the production accounts.
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I think that the best version of the Twist in the village can be found in “Young Guns 2”; and you don’t have to wait over an hour for that reveal.
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They’re actually called that over in Australia? I had thought that the Auntie Donna guys just made up that term to be silly.
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150K for Bryce Dallas Howerd. Yikes—especially when compared to all the men around her.
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This is often brought up, but it was her feature debut and she’s the daughter of Ron Howard. So it was a) not unreasonable and b) a token anyway because she’s Hollywood royalty.
Not lying here: I figured it out from the trailer which more than hinted at a classic Twilight Zone twist to come, i.e., totally predictable. What wasn’t predictable was the horrible dialogue.
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