Not the disaster that most of the reviews would have you believe, but not a very good movie, either.
The movie opens with an animated introduction about the days of yore, when mankind regularly talked to, and took advice from, the creatures of the sea. But alas, as time has passed, mankind has "forgotten how to listen," and only occasionally do the sea people try to reach out to we violent humans.
Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) is a Narf who is the latest emissary from the Blue World, and she appears in the swimming pool of "The Cove," a rundown Philadelphia apartment complex. Story is discovered by Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), and she tells him that she has come to visit a writer who lives in his building.
The mythology of the Blue World is a story that humanity remembers only as an old, almost-forgotten Korean legend (or so Shyamalan tells us; it's actually a "mythology" of his own creation). The movie spells the mythology out for us in dribs and drabs, as Cleveland turns to his Korean-American tenants for explanations; the college-student daughter translates as her mother shares the story her grandmother used to tell.
But, alas, Mrs. Choi is a cranky old woman who doesn't like to be interrupted, so the telling of the legend is very disjointed. Cleveland gets a piece of it, uses that information to get through the next fifteen minutes of the movie, then runs back to Mrs. Choi to find out what crucial bit of information she's left out this time. By the time Cleveland finally gets the whole story from Mrs. Choi, we've been given a complicated mess about Narfs and Scrunts and The Tartutic, and the human Guardian and Guild and Healer who are supposed to help the Madame Narf, and none of it makes a lick of sense.
Shyamalan has assembled a fine cast of actors, though -- Jeffrey Wright, Bob Balaban, Mary Beth Hurt, Bill Irwin, Freddy Rodriguez, Sarita Choudhury, Tovah Feldshuh -- and when they all come together for the movie's final sequence, they play this goofy material with such conviction that it works better than it has any right too. (Sadly, Shyamalan has also cast himself, as is his wont, and in a larger role than usual as the writer whom Story has come to see; he's a stiff and clunky presence.)
As is usually the case with Shyamalan's movies, it looks marvelous -- the talented Christopher Doyle is the cinematographer -- and no one generates suspense through skillful use of sound as well as Shyamalan. James Newton Howard has scored all of Shyamalan's movies since The Sixth Sense, and his music here is effectively creepy.
So yes, the movie's beautifully made and well acted, but the story is such a mess that it's hard to care. And -- mild spoilers here -- the none-too-subtle ways in which Shyamalan makes the movie about himself are rather heavy-handed; Shyamalan's writer character is told that he will be martyred for the brilliant ideas which will eventually change the world for the better, and the most unlikable character in the movie (the only one killed by the monster) is a movie critic.
There's something sad, really, in watching a talented director get so wound up in his own personal mythology that he can't see the flaws in his own writing anymore. Shyamalan desperately needs to focus on his strengths as a director the next time around, and leave the writing to someone else, but I don't think he's capable of hearing that message.
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