Reception
The Village has received mixed to negative reviews from film critics, earning a "rotten" certification at Rotten Tomatoes with only 43% giving it a positive appraisal, based on 197 reviews, and a score of 44 out of 100 ("mixed or average") in Metacritic's weighted average scoring system, based on 40 reviews.
Roger Ebert gave the film one star and wrote: "The Village is a colossal disappointment, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn ... To call the ending an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It was all a dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore." There were also comments that the film, while raising questions about conformity in a time of "evil," did little to "confront" those themes. Slate's Michael Agger commented that Shyamalan was continuing in a pattern of making "sealed-off movies that apart when exposed to outside logic." The film is listed on Ebert's "Most Hated" list.
The movie did have a number of admirers. Critic Jeffrey Westhoff commented that though the film had its shortcomings, these did not necessarily render it a bad movie, and that "Shyamalan's orchestration of mood and terror is as adroit as ever". Philip Horne of The Daily Telegraph in a later review noted "this exquisitely crafted allegory of American soul-searching seems to have been widely misunderstood".
The soundtrack by Howard has also been widely praised, and was nominated by the American Film Institute as one of the Best Film Scores and the Academy Award for Best Original Score. Finnish musician Tuomas Holopainen has also expressed his love of the soundtrack in interviews, describing it as "the most beautiful soundtrack of all time" from "definitely the most beautiful movie" and explaining that the soundtrack has helped him through personal crises.
Read more about this topic: The Village (2004 film)
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