This is, by far, one of the most baffling movies to ever exist. Saw it on edible night again for the first time since it was in theaters.
This movie should have a cult status similar to The Room. This is M. Night Shyamalan at his worst. At the time this movie came out in '06, Unbreakable and The Sixth Sense were distant memories, and Signs and The Village, which are pretty bad movies, were his two most recent flicks. Signs is a much worse movie than this because it's really really boring in addition to stupid. I never saw The Village but I saw this one because I was assured by a friend that it was the funniest movie of 2006 and boy was he right. And I think that's part of what makes it so confusing. The tone of this movie is all over the place. From scene to scene I'm not sure if this is meant to be Drama, Psychological Thriller, Horror, or Comedy.
Spoilers below the cut.
But by and large there is one message that I think is abundantly clear now that I'm 15 years older and wiser about media literacy. Shyamalan wrote this movie to send the message "UGH you just dont GET IT"
There are so many weird decisions in this movie.
First, because there's not alot to say about it and we should get it out of the way, the editing and camerawork in this movie is absolutely frenetic.
Next, we have the cast of characters. Paul Giamatti does a fantastic job acting with one of the worst scripts I've ever seen committed to film. At this point I think he was still kind of up-and-coming but wasn't a huge star. Probably the most reasonable character in the whole film up until the part where he has to cry in order to create Healing Powers so he thinks about his murdered family.
In addition to that we have a girl who is, I think, putting on one of the fakest chinese accents of of all time. Her character's role is basically relay this ancient bedtime story that lines up pretty much exactly with what's going on in the film by constantly asking her mother and then translating it to Cleveland (Paul Giamatti's character) so he can help the Mermaid Lady. One of the strangest and funniest scenes to come out of this whole thing is she says "My mother needs to view you as a child" so she gives him cookies and milk and has him ask about the rest of the bedtime story, then he is told not to wipe off his milk mustache and leans over curled up on the couch. It's really quite something to behold.
We have a guy who is meant to be "Old" and the way they do this is show him sitting in his apartment with old WWII footage on TV and a line that establishes that he lived there before Paul Giamatti's character started working for the apartment building.
We have The Movie Critic who has just moved into the building, who is asked " ok so IF i were in a movie and I were looking for x y and z archetypes where would I find them" and he ends up describing other tenants in the building, and then more importantly is completely wrong about it for the purposes of this movie because M Night couldn't help himself, but it doesn't even stop there. Oh no. Later, when the Scrunt is On The Prowl, and we'll get to the Scrunt later because you're probably asking yourself "What the FUCK is a Scrunt?" this guy gets locked in a hallway with it and narrates his own death as it is happening on screen by starting with "oh my god this is just like in a horror movie when an unlikable side character gets killed."
We have a single dad and his son, the dad is Bernard from Westworld and he loves to do crossword puzzles and his son loves to see Symbolism looking at Cereal Boxes so it stands to reason that his son ends up being "The Interpreter" and reads a fucking PROPHECY off of a bunch of GENERAL MILLS BOXES and then later walks into the room and says "I read it wrong! I had the incorrect pronoun" like what the FUCK is even HAPPENING here.
And my personal favorite, we have The Guy Who Only Works Out One Side of His Body who is introduced at the beginning describing himself as "like a scientist" and then we don't see him again until the very end when he stares down the Scrunt and prevents it from attacking.
That brings me to the other supernatural funny ha-ha's in this film.
First of all the mermaid in this film is named Story. And she is a Narf which is I guess what M Night decided Mermaids are called in The Blue World? Anyway she insists on fucking whispering so when I put on GBBO afterwards our eardrums got blasted for a minute before I remembered that I kept turning the TV up.
The Scrunt is a wolf made of grass that loves to attack Narfs (Narves?)??? But also there are laws that prevent this so when the Scrunt attacks The Narf that means that The Mermaid is Madame Narf and not just Regular Narf. But now this has pissed off the Tartutik, which is where the entire VFX budget of this film is, they're gorillas made out of wood branches so they come out and beat the Scrunt to death. Also the Scrunt in one scene is referred to as a J. G. Scrunt but nobody knows what that means because it's never mentioned again.
This post is getting REALLY long and I have to head out for a haircut appointment soon, so I will explain one more thing, but I assure you it's the funniest fucking part. M Night is in this movie. He plays Vick, who is a writer that lives with his sister. The idea is that Story has to "see someone" to inspire him to initiate great change in the world. M Night is writing something called The Cookbook which is a bunch vague of political ideas that will vaguely "revolutionize the world" and eventually will get him fucking assassinated but afterwards someone will grow up to be president who loved his book? So yes M Night Shyamalan wrote himself into his own movie after two movies that sucked shit as basically The Savior of Mankind.
The whole thing is pretty fucking contrived and its amazing