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:	post by xmikex at 2010-09-21 15:09:07

Let's discuss this movie.

1. Yes. The old lady is the devil. The real spoiler here is that Shyamalan has become so synonymous with the OMFGz plot twist that the movie itself becomes a game of hunt the plot twist. You spend the whole time thinking OMFGz I bet it's this guy!! and forget that there's even a movie going on.

2. This was a really cheaply done film. Everything was so rushed. For a film that was supposedly about 5 people trapped in an elevator I felt like I was having a new character (back story and all) thrown at me every 5 minutes. The ex-marine's girlfriend that get's slapped on at the end was the straw that broke the camel's back. "He had a job interview and didn't want to bring his tools. boo hoo!" Job interview for what? Maintenance worker? Maybe... they only had 1 for the whole 40 story building.

3. Shyamalan has a real fascination with the power of storytelling. He used to be very subtle about it: the media coverage of the aliens in signs juxtaposed with the "swing away" story of the dead mother, Bruce Willis convincing himself he's still alive through only seeing what he wanted, the ability of the people in The Village to keep their villagers unaware of the outside world through stories of monsters. Etc. Then something happened.

My take on it was that the Village came out, and everyone was expecting this paranormal horror film, and what they ended up with was a beautifully made film that got shit on because everyone was playing hunt the plot twist and didn't like what they got. So he went out and made Lady in the Water: a story about a story and people telling and re-enacting a story (the hero of it all being Shyamalan himself). It was so over the top in it's fairy tale supernatural-ness that you just rolled your eyes at it for 90 minutes. I always thought of Lady in the Water as Shyamalan's fuck you to fans and critics for not liking The Village.

So his obsession with story telling rears it's head once again in Devil, again not really hidden or alluded to as in his previous films but just kind of thrown out there. We get this odd little story about how the devil comes to Earth for no apparent reason, announces itself with a suicide (of the only character in the film we don't get any info on), corals a bunch of randoms together in an elevator, and makes toast fall jelly side down.

4. The dialog was cheeeeeap. Everything the fake Dylan McDermot cop had to say sounded like it came out of a soap opera. It sounded really rushed and unnatural.

5. That crappy demon face or whatever that came up in between frames on the security camera.... give me a break. It looked like something leftover from Quake II and about 10 minutes worth of AfterEffects work. The weird face never ties into anything else, and never makes any sense. Granted, The Exorcist did something similar but that was at least subtle and scary.

6. The scenes when the lights went out just weren't very visceral. I mean I get it, the lights are out there's only so much you can do. But they didn't do a very good job of sound designing, or being patient to make people really freak out about being in the dark. It was a lot of cheap Hollywood flashy cuts.

There were some definite positives though. One I loved the opening sequence with the inverted helicopter shot going through the cityscape. It was very surreal... up until the Ghostbusters score came in and took a chunk out of it's eeriness. How Shyamalan went from the Hillary Hahn score of The Village to this canned horror movie crap score is beyond me.

The old lady plot twist wasn't that bad. I mean she was dead. You suspect her at first, but then kind of forget about her for a while.

I found something really creepy about the part when hoodie guy tries to get out through the top of the elevator and then the gold digger girl flips out like she's possessed and starts yelling he's trying to escape. In fact she did that a few times, and it was one of the more powerful moments in the film.

The big black dude reminded me of the singer of Stout. and I lul-ed.

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