I took advantage of my family being away and decided to watch 'The Village' at a local cinema. So there I was fully bloated from an eat-all-you-can Chinese meal sitting by myself in a darkened cinema preparing to scare myself to death.
:: Warning !! Spoilers !! ::
Despite the bad reviews I read I thoroughly enjoyed it. I just think the marketing of the movie was off. It's not a horror movie - it's a psychological thriller. It is a well made movie without the usual Hollywood wham-bam-in-your-face action horror suspense. The writing is very good, the cinematography is superb, the character development is good too (although me thinks Sigourney Weaver was underutilised). It was a pleasant surprise for me on how good Bryce Dallas Howard was. Really superb acting from her and I won't be surprised if she becomes a big big star after this. The one thing bothering me is the dialog ... it's... ah ... how would I say it ... a bit wooden sometimes. It's the same in Unbreakable, there are scenes where dialogs seem unnatural.
It did made me jump a number of times but I think the Sixth Sense is scarier and much better. The thing that made this special for me is how it made me think on the themes and ideas it presented after getting out of the cinema. It speaks about fear, the fear that we hold in ourselves. That fear is actually all in our minds. And how it affect and mould us. The secrets that we hold. Of the lengths that parents will do to shelter their children from voilence and bad influences. Do you think the elders were right in holding the children in that one place? And making them think they have no other place to go? They are controlling the lives of the young ones to protect them from the horrors of the outside world. What they did not bargain for is that 'bad things' can happen anywhere whether you are in an isolated island or in a dark alleyway in a city.