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Edited on Wed Jul-19-06 01:02 AM by Godhumor
I do not want to step on Radio_Lady's toes with this, but I just need to say something about this movie...
It's horrible.
It's horrible in a lot of ways, but the worst is that it takes itself seriously, and it shouldn't.
Let me do a quick drive-by in bullet format:
- The basic premise is actually pretty neat--there are two worlds living in co-existence with each other. Our world and the "Blue World" that lives underwater. The two worlds drifted apart, because humankind wants to own everything. When we lost contact with the Blue World we become violent.
- The good people of the Blue World, nymphs called narfs, are trying to reestablish contact with our world. They do this by sending their young out onto our land to have them inspire an "awakening" in individuals.
- There are creatures who disguise themselves as grass called scrunts that hunt and kill narfs when they leave the Blue World, so it's dangerous to leave.
Simple enough, so let's start talking about where it goes wrong.
- The narf awakens a human by looking at the person (vessel) he or she has been assigned. When that person sees their narf, he or she feels a pins and needles sensation through their body.
- Bryce Howard's role as the narf consists of looking at one person and then cowering the rest of the film. Seriously, that's her entire job. The entire movie is based on her looking at one person. I just wonder if M. Night Shyamalan ever thought to himself, "So...she looks at him and then...oh to hell with the then. She just looks at 'im."
- The main character, Cleveland Heep, manages to discover the entire history and purpose of Story (name of the narf) by asking a young Korean woman to look up "narf" in her textbook. It turns out she already knows what a narf is, as her mother used to tell bedtime stories about them. Through the mother, Heep figures out her purpose, the creatures hunting her, and the roles of the humans who are destined to protect and help her (the healer, guardian, interpreter, and guild). It is a massive stretch of almost unbelievable proportions, that two people living in this tiny apartment complex know the history of the Blue World--who have kept themselves pretty much secret for thousands of years. Shyamalan tries to explain it away with a one sentence comment along the lines that the right people were drawn to the apartment building long before the narf came (which just opens up an entirely different unresolved plot point of whether the Blue World denizens can control us, but I digress.), but it just doesn't work for me. Heep goes from clueless to completely filled in within a few minutes, and never once does he question the information, the source, or the validity. I almost threw my shoe at the screen.
- The rest of the movie is Heep assembling the team of humans he thinks are the promised roles and trying to get her back to the Blue World while protecting her from the evil scrunt.
- If you know the Shyamalan formula you know nothing is ever straightforward. There is no "twist" this time around, but I figured out who the "real" helpers were within 30 seconds of the positions (healer, guardian, etc.) being announced.
- The scene with the interpreter is just ungodly awful and actually made the theater patrons laugh out loud--and not because it was funny.
- The only fatality in the entire movie is an unlikable movie critic--apparently poor M. Night has some issues with criticism.
- Shyamalan has gone from cameo to supporting lead in this movie, and he absolutely has no idea how to act. It was an act of sheer ego that brought a bad movie down even farther.
- A lot of things were never explained at all (Why did the narf steal stuff from people? How did the Koreans know the Blue World legend Overall, I can't say anything positive about this movie. It saddens me to see just how far Shyamalan has fallen since the "Sixth Sense".
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