A young artist gets stranded in an extensive, immaculate forest in western Ireland, where, after finding shelter, she becomes trapped alongside three strangers, stalked by mysterious creatures each night.
It's got spooky woods, but a let down in every other way
I wanted to like this movie more, but man... The plot holes! I can suspend my disbelief up to a point, but this was ridiculous.
Big chechov's gun that never goes off... The boss's face is never shown (conspicuously), and he's the one who sends her on this wild goose chase into the wild, but it's never brought up again. It wouldn't be unreasonable to guess that he's a halfling, but there's not a good reason he'd send her out there
They live in a bunker without running water for months, but there's no indication that they live near a stream or collect rain water
Dakota Fanning is missing for at least a few months. Who's paying her rent? Her landlady nor her boss reports her missing to the police?
The professor's office is preserved for 15 years via a student donation fund. Really? Really?!
These people have been in this bunker for months, and have never looked under the rug. OMG, there's a trapdoor down there! As if after watching "Love Island 12" for the 100th time they wouldn't poke around their one room a bit
The professor is supposedly convincing 13 men a night from surrounding towns to come into the forest to build an unground bunker. And this supposedly goes on for YEARS. So no one notices that the local population is being decimated? And none of these tradesmen ask "hey, who was working on this before? Where are they?" This professor singlehandedly killed more people than the Iraq war
Why are the faeries trying to study and imitate humans if they can't leave the magical forest?
I just saw Fanning in Ripley, and thought her wooden performance made sense there; her character is jaded, directionless, and a bit of a dead-behind-the-eyes mooch.
But then I see Fanning doing the same character in the Watchers, and now I'm left wondering if maybe she's just a bad actor.
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Reviewed by cdjh-811255 / 10
A Frustrating Waste of an Intriguing Set Up
While Ishana Night Shyamalan absolutely is her own filmmaker, and should her films judged on their own merits, The Watchers reminded me a lot of her fathers works in the ways that I usually find his films frustrating. I'm going to try my best not to keep comparing this to M. Night's movies but in particular The Watchers reminded me a lot of The Village and the issues I have with that film and I think I'd still feel that way with or without the familial connection.
Because like The Village, The Watchers has a very intriguing hook that presents a lot of interesting story possibilities very early on but it never capitalises on them in any satisfying way. The dialogue is really weak here and it's frequently delivered in extremely wooden ways which most rears its head in the exposition. Because Shyamalan clearly doesn't believe in the less-is-more approach in that she feels the need to over explain everything and as a result the mystery never really feels that intriguing. Most of the reveals come across as very flat that feel like they lack sufficient build up to be satisfying.
It's also very repetitive for most of the first 2 acts with it essentially following the same stricture of leaving this house and returning to it before night fall and it just came across as tiring rather tension-building. The reveals don't really feel earned and they're the one thing I wanted the film to explore more but the script really feels like it strikes the worst balance with what it chooses to focus on. The 3rd act was also a pretty big disappointment. The main action that's being built up for the entire film is achieved in a fairly standard way that doesn't feel fitting for what was being set up and it makes the mistake of feeling like it's getting ready to end only to go on for what felt like another 30 minutes.
Thankfully what saves the film from being a complete waste of time is the truly impressive filmmaking on display. It's gorgeously shot and visually ambitious in a way that feels like it could only come from a first-time director. I thought the score was phenomenal as was the cinematography in a way that didn't feel like it was drawing too much attention to itself. There are some very effective scares and genuine scenes of tension, unfortunately it was just never sustained enough to keep my interest. It's the script that ultimately sunk this movie for me but it's very clear that Ishana Night Shyamalan has real talent behind the camera.
The Watchers was frustrating waste of potential for me and something that never really felt like it capitalised on its intriguing set up. It's just reeks of a script that doesn't trust the intelligence of it's audience and I was just so consistently irritated at how the film kept going out of it's way to explain things in the most clunky and unimaginative ways possible. I can see what Shyamalan was going for, and if anything it makes more interested to read the novel, but her very clear talents just end up being wasted on a really poor script.
