WARNING! Perhaps spoilers about this movie, so go see the movie, then come back and read my opinion. I'll put a few blank lines here to give you time to go see it before you read this.

Mary and I just got back from seeing “The Village” (according to imdb, it is AKA "M. Night Shyamalan's The Village"). Well, we definitely had differing opinions of it.

Coming out of the theater, Mary basically said she was unimpressed, remarking how it was ridiculous that these people would force themselves back in time, even taking on the speech patterns of people in early America. She thought this was way too contrived, just adding more hassle to what they were doing. She didn't understand why they bothered dressing old-style like that, or really anything about it. Needless to say, she was totally unsatisfied with the movie and its entertainment value.

On the other hand, I thought it was a really good allegory for the times that we live in, stressing how it is fruitless to hide yourself away from the world just because there are bad things. The elders created an enemy outside the borders that they used when necessary to keep their children from venturing too far away, from being too curious about the outside world, basically to control them. However, as a result of this, they suffered greatly when the time came to depend on it (in the case of medicine, for example). Plus, Lucius and Ivy started to question what was happening, not bowing to their fear. Mary mentioned that the elders were stupid, because even in the first generation of children, they were starting to question. I think that was a good point made in the movie that it is inevitable that very quickly people will begin to distrust the whole framework of fear that they see ruling their lives. In the movie, when it is found out that Noah had gone into the woods, the elders decided it was time to bring the monsters into the village to make them a bit more real, deliver a warning. This is, of course, a very obvious comparison to the way that our government uses the so-called Terror Alert, raising it and lowering it as they need to draw attention away from things.

Now, I'm no great scholar or movie critic, and there are definitely things in the movie that I think I missed and am eager to think a bit more on, specifically the relationship between lucius, ivy and noah and what it may represent. But, as is common with M. Night Shyamalan's movies, there are layers upon layers, providing quite a bit of entertaining thought.

And here I am, one of the few people I know that loved Unbreakable.

[Update: I was talking to some guys at work, and I now have met 4 people (myself and my brother-in-law included) who loved Unbreakable]