An Alternative View of The Village

On Tuesday, Ken Tanner offered one view of M. Night Shyamalan’s movie The Village. For an alternative, more critical, view see our contributing editor Peter Leithart’s notes on The Village, posted on his weblog, the plainly named Leithart.com. (Peter is not the sort of man to use a cutesy title.)

I enjoyed the movie, but I agree much more with Peter than with Ken about its defects. The line “The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe” tempted me to join those people Ken chastises for laughing. All I could think of was that dad was feeling really stressed out and wouldn’t talk like that otherwise.

That said, as Peter goes on to suggest, there is much to admire in the movie. It stands out from the average movie, even many of the “serious” ones, in raising questions worth asking. You get your money’s worth from Shyamalan.