Reviews

I've had this film in my DVD library for 15 years, and it is still one of my all-time favorites. No CGI; no superheroes; no foul language; no gunfights; no interminable car chases. Just the courage of an overcoming love by a remarkable, blind young lady. This is all set in a hidden, quaint 19th century wilderness village isolated from the modern world, totally protected from any contact or exposure to the world, which is the very purpose of this Village.

Shyamalan's story is all about the pursuit of protection of innocence, and the selflessness of real love, alien concepts today. In a peaceful place where a broken heart is the most violence normally experienced, the Village elders struggle with the losses brought on by their dramatic decades-old determination to achieve total isolation from the outside evil.

The Village cannot escape tragedy, even though the founders created it many years prior to flee from the pointless violence and tragedies that marred all of their young lives 'out there' in the modern world. So their new brilliantly isolated world was established - one that has its own artificial boundary made up on a story of very real bogeymen surrounding the Village who will attack all who wander past the boundary. The pastoral thousand-acre Village landscape in the rolling hills and woods of Pennsylvania is the perfect framework for this story of return to innocence, love and courage, a return to a time when people talked, played, and danced with each other instead of obsessing over a smart screen.

Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt, and Juaquin Phoenix put in strong, sympathetic performances; but Bryce Dallas Howard (Jurassic World redhead) steals the film and hearts with a brilliant, funny, compassionate performance. Shyamalan's films all seem to have a sense of 'otherness' about them, as this one certainly does, but the driving force in the Village is the depth and courage of true love, whether it is expressed in the elders creating the safe haven of the Village for their children and grandchildren, or in the blind young Ivy on her impossible quest to save her new fiancé's life. This film is far more powerful, uplifting and rewarding than any GGI film I have ever watched.

To call this series Sci Fi is a stretch, and I write as one who is not a fan of the CGI 'Sci Fi' shows any more as they have been reduced to adolescent violence fantasies dressed up in the same fancy CGI garb. But Night Sky is the opposite extreme - a glacial soap opera about an old couple dealing with their oldness, and the viewer has the privilege of watching them struggle to do their daily chores and argue about getting old, which are the highlights of their senior citizen lives, outside of one supernatural anomaly introduced in the first episode that is used to string along the viewer along as a tease that something interesting might actually develop in the next few episodes; but it is pretty much just a tease, at least through six episodes.

The writers manage to inch forward the plot a few steps every two or three episodes, but the constant mindless filler in between made me pick up a good book to read while watching this series. For the first six episodes, each scene is dwelled on far too long, the camera lingers on the faces way too long, and the discussions are simply meaningless and pointless. There is zero plot development, and the story (Is there a story?) just becomes tedious. And then it becomes annoying. And the mystery man, Jude, who comes through the magic space portal in the shed basement has all the personality and energy of a tree sloth, and he says just about as much. This guy came straight from a Zombie movie, and the natural response whenever he is on-screen is to shake him and slap him in the face and yell at him to wake up.

At the end of episode 5 things start to get interesting, and the final episode actually has plot development and some action. The mystery of the antagonist 'faithful ones' pursuing the 'apostate' Jude is never explained, nor is their connection to the mystery planet outside the portal in the old folks' shed basement, so there is absolutely no meaning to what little drama there is in the series.

What is the take-away from this story? What is the great reveal? The moral of the story? There is none. The final episode tries to tease that something interesting just might happen in the next season; but after the glacial pace of the first season, you just know that you would have to sit through 8 more episodes of nothingness in season 2 to see any new plot developments or meaningful events, making me grateful that the series has been cancelled. The planet that appears in the mysterious portal in the York's shed basement turns out to be an arid wasteland with apparently unbreathable air, which is the perfect metaphor for this annoying series. It is a void with no meaning or message.

Think Spaceballs meets 2012 meets Scary Movie. Every character is a bad caricature; every family is grotesquely dysfunctional. The NASA administrators are clowns; the NASA scientists are goons; the hero NASA astronaut acts like a petulant teenager; the newscasters sound like junior high journalism club wannabe announcers; and as soon as the disaster hits the fan, the NASA director decides to quit and go home.

Emmerich stole scenes and ideas from his 2012 and Independence Day, as well as Joseph Kosinski's Oblivion, along with 2001 Space Odyssey & Elysium. Throw in evil AI space aliens, artificial moon conspiracies, and the usual end-of-the world countdown, and it's hard to decide if Emmerich wanted the movie to be comically horrible, or if he has just developed a total contempt for movie viewers. If this is supposed to be a space/disaster comedy, Emmerich doesn't pull it off. The ending is supposed to be an epic explanation of the cosmos and life, and again Emmerich doesn't pull it off. At this point in the movie, the story has zero credibility.

The disaster scenes are typical CGI fare; unfortunately, the story line, sub-plots, dialogue, and character development are just insulting, not funny. Halle Barry, Donald Sutherland, Patrick Wilson, Michael Pena in the cast give the impression that this would be a serious film, but the writing is a compendium of all the bad, tired sci fi space/disaster/horror cliches on steroids. Emmerich really should have cast Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, since this film is just a space version of Dumb and Dumber; but if it is supposed to be a farce of all disaster movies, it lacks the personality, warmth and humor of a good satire.