The Village and other thoughts concerning M. Night.

This isn't actually a movie review. In preperation for the soon coming Lady in the Water, I was thinking about other M. Night flicks. Well, I guess I was really thinking about M. Night in general. He has become known as the crazy twist guy. You'll be watching one of his movies and think you have it figured out, and then you find out that Bruce Willis was dead or that he has supernatural powers. And that little girl was totally right about the water.
We came to expect that from him. He, like so many actors, has been typecast as the director who never ends a movie like you expect. The problem with that is that he constantly has to one up the suspense he built up in the last movie. But, not every movie is a thriller. If he made every movie a thriller, he would become cliche and blah and no one would go see his movies anymore.
But, when M. Night makes a movie that isn't a thriller, people are disappointed. Case in point: The Village. Everyone expected the movie to be about scary monsters. So when there were no scary monsters, just the elders dressed up in crazy costumes, people thought that was the crazy twist. But, no, if that's what you thought then you wrong. Some people thought that the crazy twist was the fact that the village wasn't what you thought. It was a modern day group of people that had voluntarily secluded themselves from the world. If this is what you thought, then you were only half right.
The crazy twist in The Village is that it isn't a thriller. It's not about the monsters. It's not about the suspense. It's about love. Yep, it's M. Night's version of a love story. And, it's a damn good version. But, before you go thinking the wrong thing again, let me just add that it's not just about romantic love. It's about people loving their children and their family so much that they were willing to seclude themselves from the rest of the big scary world so that they could give their children the best possible life. They gave up their careers and the members of their family who didn't want to come so that they could build a better life. It's about the kind of love that produces a kind of pain that would make people want to seclude themselves from the rest of the world. It's about loving someone so deeply that when you lose them, you lose yourself.
The elders understood that love so completely that when Lucius Hunt was stabbed they broke all their rules to save Ivy walker from that same kind of pain. It's a movie about a love so pure that if you're not careful you could miss it. It's a movie about innocence.
Only a genius of a director could pull of such an amazing movie. And, only M. Night is that kind of genius. Perhaps I am a bit biased, but few movies are shot as well as his. His aliens were probably the most beleivable aliens I have seen in a movie in a long time. And what director pays such attention to detail as he did in The Sixth Sense? And, what does it say about a director when actors want to work with him again and again? And, not just any actor, good actors. Bruce Willis, Bryce Dallas Howard, Joaquin Phoenix have all worked for him twice. He's had Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver, Adrien Brody, Samuel L. Jackson, Haley Joel Osmet, and Toni Collete in at least one of his projects. That's not a list you should sneeze at. So, don't.
All of you need to go out and rent The Village and any other M. Night movie you didn't like and watch it again with new eyes. Shake off your old prejudices. Stop looking for the twist and start looking for the story. Because not only is M. Night a brilliant director, he is a fantastic writer, a story teller.