Movies Knock at the Cabin - M. Night Shyamalan’s adaptation of The Cabin at the End of the World (Now on Peacock)

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

I enjoyed this more than I thought I would and it's definitely one of Shyamalan's better recent movies. So in the book,

  Hide contents

they decided to let the world end? 

 

More or less.

 

Spoiler

In the book, Wen is killed, and Eric and Andrew are on opposite ends of whether this is real or made up. They eventually come to the consensus that if it’s real, Wen’s death should be enough, and if it isn’t enough, screw that God and the whole world too.

 

The book ends with them still in the woods, so it is never revealed if the world was being destroyed or not.

 

[skillzdadirecta]

1 minute ago, sblfilms said:

More or less.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

In the book, Wen is killed, and Eric and Andrew are on opposite ends of whether this is real or made up. They eventually come to the consensus that if it’s real, Wen’s death should be enough, and if it isn’t enough, screw that God and the whole world too.

 

The book ends with them still in the woods, so it is never revealed if the world was being destroyed or not.

 

Ah... yeah there was no way they were doing that on film 

[best3444]

Just watched this. I really liked it overall. After reading sblfilms spoiler about the way the book ends I think this was much, much better. 8/10

[Derek]

Watched it last night. I thought it was decent. I did like Batista.

 

Spoiler

The instantaneous news coverage of everything starting and stopping kind of took me out of it, especially the virus. Maybe it was kind of time play that I missed.

 

[Mercury33]

Just watched it. I enjoyed it, granted I’ve pretty much enjoyed all of M Nights movies except Signs. Bautista was very much the highlight for me. I hope this leads to him getting a lot more dramatic rolls. I feel like he’s proving he really can handle anything. 

[skillzdadirecta]

55 minutes ago, Mercury33 said:

granted I’ve pretty much enjoyed all of M Nights movies except Signs.

So crazy because signs might be my favorite movie he's done. You like Lady in The Water and The Happening too??? 

[johnny]

signs is god shit

 

edit: meant good. god works 

[Greatoneshere]

Good to Great Shyamalan: The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, Split

 

Decent Shyamalan: The Visit, Glass, Old

 

Bad Shyamalan: Wide Awake, Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender, After Earth

 

I haven't seen Knock at the Cabin yet. Some might argue The Village should be bumped down to decent Shyamalan (no way with that Roger Deakins cinematography and exploration of false utopias) or that OId should be bumped up to decent Shyamalan (I need to give that one a rewatch). Otherwise I think this is pretty on point.

[skillzdadirecta]

I would say Old is decent and I'd drop Glass down to bad. I've never seen the visit and never even heard of Wide Awake. Need to look that one up. His show Servant on Apple TV was pretty good until the final episode where they completely dropped the ball. Ironically he directed the next to last episode which was VERY well done.

[SaysWho?]

On 3/25/2023 at 1:21 PM, skillzdadirecta said:

I enjoyed this more than I thought I would and it's definitely one of Shyamalan's better recent movies. So in the book,

  Hide contents

they decided to let the world end? 

 

 

On 3/25/2023 at 1:31 PM, sblfilms said:

More or less.

 

  Hide contents

In the book, Wen is killed, and Eric and Andrew are on opposite ends of whether this is real or made up. They eventually come to the consensus that if it’s real, Wen’s death should be enough, and if it isn’t enough, screw that God and the whole world too.

 

The book ends with them still in the woods, so it is never revealed if the world was being destroyed or not.

 

 

The interesting thing for me is the author 

Spoiler

wrote the book before the pandemic and at the start of Trump's presidency, so after gone through the past 7 years, he'd be on the side of the apocalypse not being real and just a bunch of bad stuff that happened at the same time:

"That was the story: their choice. Their ultimate rejection of fear and cruelty, whether or not the apocalypse is happening. What has happened in the cabin and what they’re presented with is wrong; it’s immoral, and they refuse. And I find that hopeful, especially in the context of when I wrote the book. Now that we’re well beyond Trump’s presidency — hopefully — and everything that’s happened in 2020 and since, I believe if I read the book now, I don’t think there’s an apocalypse happening. But that’s just my opinion."

 

[TheLeon]

3 hours ago, skillzdadirecta said:

I would say Old is decent and I'd drop Glass down to bad. I've never seen the visit and never even heard of Wide Awake. Need to look that one up. His show Servant on Apple TV was pretty good until the final episode where they completely dropped the ball. Ironically he directed the next to last episode which was VERY well done.

Nah, you’re good. 

It’s one of his pre-Sixth Sense movies that basically everyone agreed to just forget about. There’s another one that I believe was more or less a student film starring himself called Praying With Anger. 

[Greatoneshere]

6 hours ago, skillzdadirecta said:

I would say Old is decent and I'd drop Glass down to bad. I've never seen the visit and never even heard of Wide Awake. Need to look that one up. His show Servant on Apple TV was pretty good until the final episode where they completely dropped the ball. Ironically he directed the next to last episode which was VERY well done.

 

Yeah, I went back and forth on Glass, it's just the first third of Glass I felt was pretty cool, I wish the movie had stuck to that premise. And Wide Awake was M. Night's first real film starring Rosie O'Donnell. It's the film he made before The Sixth Sense, but after his student film Praying with Anger. It came out in 1998. And it's good to hear he's good on the small screen - I haven't seen Wayward Pines, which he executive produced and directed 1 episode, or Servant, which he executive produced and directed 5 episodes.

 

2 hours ago, TheLeon said:

Nah, you’re good. 

It’s one of his pre-Sixth Sense movies that basically everyone agreed to just forget about. There’s another one that I believe was more or less a student film starring himself called Praying With Anger. 

 

People can choose to forget about it, but given the number of bad movies he's now made, I think we need to count it. It's a real film, with real actors, that he solely wrote and directed. I've seen it (a long time ago), it's bad/hokey, but it counts. I let Praying with Anger slide because M. Night hates that movie and it was a student film, not a full Hollywood production like Wide Awake.

[TheLeon]

22 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

People can choose to forget about it, but given the number of bad movies he's now made, I think we need to count it. It's a real film, with real actors, that he solely wrote and directed. I've seen it (a long time ago), it's bad/hokey, but it counts. I let Praying with Anger slide because M. Night hates that movie and it was a student film, not a full Hollywood production like Wide Awake.

Of course, go ahead and include it. I was just explaining why Skillz hadn’t heard of it. I think a lot of people would be surprised to know he made anything before The Sixth Sense. I bet more people know he has a writing credit on Stuart Little. At least that’s a fun little bit of trivia.

[Greatoneshere]

37 minutes ago, TheLeon said:

Of course, go ahead and include it. I was just explaining why Skillz hadn’t heard of it. I think a lot of people would be surprised to know he made anything before The Sixth Sense. I bet more people know he has a writing credit on Stuart Little. At least that’s a fun little bit of trivia.

 

Oh yeah agreed - no one should know about Wide Awake off hand.  I also did think of Stuart Little, but since he only co-wrote it and didn't direct it it wasn't worthy - but definitely some fun trivia. 

[Mercury33]

Yeah I despise Signs. What a piece of shit that movie is. Swing Away 🙄 fuck off. 
 

Lady in the Water wasn’t good but I didn’t hate it. I actually enjoy The Happening. I don’t know why. I just do haha. 
 

The Village I would put in the Great category. People just got mad at it because they got tricked by the purposefully misleading advertising. 

[Greatoneshere]

17 minutes ago, Mercury33 said:

The Village I would put in the Great category. People just got mad at it because they got tricked by the purposefully misleading advertising. 

 

Yeah I think it was that, how sedate and serious the actual film was, and people didn't like the "twist" ending, especially for his fourth movie in a row having one. I think if people go back and just watch the film with no expectations like twists, etc. they'll get a lot more out of it. It's incredibly atmospheric and moody.

 

Also I bumped Old up to Decent Shyamalan. While not good, it doesn't deserve to be with the rest of the Bad Shyamalan list.

[skillzdadirecta]

The only problem I have with Signs is how stupid the Aliens in this movie ended up being. Everything else was really well done especially the performances from the cast including Mel Gibson (God damn him). 

 

I always liked The Village and never understood the hate it got. I would love to see Shyamalan take on an anthology format.

[best3444]

9 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

The only problem I have with Signs is how stupid the Aliens in this movie ended up being. 

 

So true. Everything else was damn good. 

 

3 hours ago, Mercury33 said:

Yeah I despise Signs. What a piece of shit that movie is. Swing Away 🙄 fuck off. 

 

Swing away was fine. It was just stupid that water was their weakness and they traveled to a planet that is 70% water. 

[Greatoneshere]

I mean, the aliens are a metaphor, it doesn't really matter what kills them or harms them or not, it's about what they represent and what water, especially all the glasses filled with water that the youngest daughter constantly leaves around the house, mean for Mel Gibson's character and the trauma he and his family have gone through. That's what the film is really about. It's the same thing, as always, as "the Looper problem" - why do they have to dump bodies in the past rather than just dump them down the Marianas Trench in the future? Because that's simply how it works.

 

Signs works much better as a family drama film of a family overcoming trauma, particularly from a specific, horrific event than it is some "alien invasion" movie. There's a reason the film hardly leaves the farm and the larger repercussions of the invasion are primarily left a mystery, because it does not matter. It's amazing to me how some small plot thing like: "the aliens' weakness was water = dumb = let's write off everything else about the movie" is just bad criticism.

 

Independence Day was a bad movie because aliens were defeated by a human computer virus that somehow successfully infects incompatible alien technology. War of the Worlds is a bad movie because the aliens were killed by the bacteria and microbes of Earth, aliens were dumb for not using alien science to check ahead of time. I mean, does the deus ex machina that defeats the aliens really matter all that much in these alien invasion movies? A dumb reason is almost always given, from Battle: Los Angeles to Edge of Tomorrow.

[TheLeon]

9 minutes ago, best3444 said:

It was just stupid that water was their weakness and they traveled to a planet that is 70% water. 

We’ve sent people the moon, where we can’t breathe. We’ve got people trying to figure out how to get to Mars, a very long trip to another place we can’t breathe. That’s space exploration, man! 

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, TheLeon said:

We’ve sent people the moon, where we can’t breathe. We’ve got people trying to figure out how to get to Mars, a very long trip to another place we can’t breathe. That’s space exploration, man! 

Yeah, I’ve always found this a weird critique given all human space travel Ks going to places inhospitable to our bodies. Radiation, gravity issues, oxygen and atmosphere issues. But we do it. No reason to believe other species wouldn’t do the same.

[skillzdadirecta]

6 minutes ago, TheLeon said:

We’ve sent people the moon, where we can’t breathe. We’ve got people trying to figure out how to get to Mars, a very long trip to another place we can’t breathe. That’s space exploration, man! 

Yeah but when we go to the moon we wear suits to protect us from the harsh environments. The Aliens in Signs showed up on Earth pretty much naked. Dumb.

 

16 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

I mean, the aliens are a metaphor, it doesn't really matter what kills them or harms them or not, it's about what they represent and what water, especially all the glasses filled with water that the youngest daughter constantly leaves around the house, mean for Mel Gibson's character and the trauma he and his family have gone through. That's what the film is really about. It's the same thing, as always, as "the Looper problem" - why do they have to dump bodies in the past rather than just dump them down the Marianas Trench in the future? Because that's simply how it works.

 

Signs works much better as a family drama film of a family overcoming trauma, particularly from a specific, horrific event than it is some "alien invasion" movie. There's a reason the film hardly leaves the farm and the larger repercussions of the invasion are primarily left a mystery, because it does not matter. It's amazing to me how some small plot thing like: "the aliens' weakness was water = dumb = let's write off everything else about the movie" is just bad criticism.

 

Independence Day was a bad movie because aliens were defeated by a human computer virus that somehow successfully infects incompatible alien technology. War of the Worlds is a bad movie because the aliens were killed by the bacteria and microbes of Earth, aliens were dumb for not using alien science to check ahead of time. I mean, does the deus ex machina that defeats the aliens really matter all that much in these alien invasion movies? A dumb reason is almost always given, from Battle: Los Angeles to Edge of Tomorrow.

 All of this is true and that's what saves the movie. It still doesn't change the fact that it's a pretty gaping plot hole that defies logic when you think about it and by logic, I mean the film's own internal logic. You have a race of Aliens that is advanced enough for interstellar travel, but they haven't figured out a way to protect themselves from an element that comprises 75% of the planet they traveled to? Dumb. 

 

Signs may be a better movie than Independence Day, but the Deus Ex Machina in that works better than the one here in Signs. That goes DOUBLE for War of the Worlds... which actually makes sense scientifically that microbes that humans have built an immunity to would be fatal to an Alien life form. NOTHING about the Water weakness in Signs makes sense and while it may not matter thematically, it definitely matters from a plot standpoint and it's a big reason why the film has so many detractors. It doesn't bother me so much and doesn't ruin the movie for me but it IS a legitmate criticism and one that Shyamalan should have forseen and come up with a solution to rather than leave in. In my humble opinion.

 

The ugly truth is that any Alien civilization that's advanced enough to reach us without us knowing about their existence prior to them coming would wipe us out in less than a day. Their tech would be so far ahead of ours that it would seem like LITERAL magic. Hollywood ignores that for the most part though. 

[Greatoneshere]

2 hours ago, skillzdadirecta said:

Yeah but when we go to the moon we wear suits to protect us from the harsh environments. The Aliens in Signs showed up on Earth pretty much naked. Dumb.

 

The ugly truth is that any Alien civilization that's advanced enough to reach us without us knowing about their existence prior to them coming would wipe us out in less than a day. Their tech would be so far ahead of ours that it would seem like LITERAL magic. Hollywood ignores that for the most part though. 

 

I don't disagree that it's dumb in Signs and elsewhere, just that it shouldn't invalidate an entire movie because of a silly deus ex machina plot detail. For a lot of people, it does, and I think you miss out on a lot of what's good in Signs and other alien invasion movies focusing on those sorts of minor things to the overall narrative (not you specifically, just speaking in general).

[Guest]

I don’t think I will ever be able to hold “plausibility” of anything in alien invasion movies against them. I think all of @Greatoneshere’s examples are things that work fine within their stories and the level of scientific seriousness with which they approach telling those stories.

 

It feels different than in something like an Andy Weir story that goes to almost annoying lengths to try and present “realism” in how these things would work.

[skillzdadirecta]

Yeah for me it doesn't invalidate the film at all. It's just incredibly stupid that these Aliens have the tech to get here and cloak themselves, but are pretty much little more than animals at the end of the day it seems. Ity doesn't bother ME... but for those it does bother, it's valid. It's pretty big plot hole... it's up to the viewer whether they forgive it or not.

[Greatoneshere]

1 hour ago, sblfilms said:

I don’t think I will ever be able to hold “plausibility” of anything in alien invasion movies against them. I think all of @Greatoneshere’s examples are things that work fine within their stories and the level of scientific seriousness with which they approach telling those stories.

 

It feels different than in something like an Andy Weir story that goes to almost annoying lengths to try and present “realism” in how these things would work.

 

Yeah I'm with you here. Signs and the other movies I've mentioned aren't even attempting "hard sci-fi" and so the deus ex machina endings never really bothered me. I always just thought to myself: "aliens can be dumb and/or unprepared too" and moved right along.

[Mercury33]

I’ve read everything you all have to say and come to a realization. 

Movie still sucks ass

[SaysWho?]

20 hours ago, Mercury33 said:

Yeah I despise Signs. What a piece of shit that movie is. Swing Away 🙄 fuck off. 
 

Lady in the Water wasn’t good but I didn’t hate it. I actually enjoy The Happening. I don’t know why. I just do haha. 
 

The Village I would put in the Great category. People just got mad at it because they got tricked by the purposefully misleading advertising. 

I watched The Village for the first time last year and already knew the ending. I still didn’t think it was good, just OK, but I do admire the concept of it all. 

Spoiler

Creating this village to get away from the world’s sin but still succumbing to it.

I just wasn’t impressed with how it was accomplished, including some of the reveals.

[Guest]

I think there is a better version of The Village out there if Shyamalan had a good co-writer. The final 15 minutes (not just the twist) aren’t a fulfilling conclusion to what came before it for me.

[Mercury33]

5 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

I think there is a better version of The Village out there if Shyamalan had a good co-writer. The final 15 minutes (not just the twist) aren’t a fulfilling conclusion to what came before it for me.

I’ve always thought Shyamalan could be great if he had a writing partner who actually edited and wrote the scripts from Shyamalan’s ideas. And then Shyamalan did the directing. I LOVE the style and feel of all his movies and the ideas always seem interesting. Just the way they play out is usually odd. 

[Guest]

Just now, Mercury33 said:

I’ve always thought Shyamalan could be great if he had a writing partner who actually edited and wrote the scripts from Shyamalan’s ideas. And then Shyamalan did the directing. I LOVE the style and feel of all his movies and the ideas always seem interesting. Just the way they play out is usually odd. 

Exactly this! I feel the same about Peele. Their films have great core ideas, they have vibes for days, but they don’t always amount to much despite lots of positive components and building blocks.

[Greatoneshere]

2 hours ago, Mercury33 said:

I’ve always thought Shyamalan could be great if he had a writing partner who actually edited and wrote the scripts from Shyamalan’s ideas. And then Shyamalan did the directing. I LOVE the style and feel of all his movies and the ideas always seem interesting. Just the way they play out is usually odd. 

 

2 hours ago, sblfilms said:

Exactly this! I feel the same about Peele. Their films have great core ideas, they have vibes for days, but they don’t always amount to much despite lots of positive components and building blocks.

 

Yeah I think this is a good take on Shyamalan. I don't think anyone doesn't think he's talented, which is why despite screenwriting flaws some of his movies are great, like Signs.  I think Peele is better in this department, but I agree the plot logic of his ideas are last on his mind (I remember when my family left a Us screening and most of them couldn't get over the logistics of the ending, whereas I was like - great commentary and themes!). 

 

Unfortunately, Jordan Peele and M. Night Shyamalan are auteurs (or consider themselves to be I imagine) since neither has ever shared a screenwriting credit with someone else on their films. Jordan Peele I could see maybe collaborating with Keegan Michael-Key since they did on Key & Peele but no one else I would think.

 

M. Night Shyamalan definitely won't ever share a screenwriting credit I assume based on his past. The only times he has were with Stuart Little, which he didn't direct and the other guy was not his co-writer; Devil, which he wrote the story for and then gave to Brian Nelson to write the screenplay, also something he didn't direct (John Erick Dowdle did) so neither of these films are really M. Night joints. After Earth and Knock at the Cabin are the only films where M. Night shares screenwriting credits with others but in both cases M. Night took other peoples' screenplays and then re-wrote them and directed them. Again, he didn't collaborate with the writers, he took over.

[stepee]

That was pretty good, though reading the spoiler for how the book ends, I think I like that better but it’s fine.

[best3444]

6 hours ago, stepee said:

That was pretty good, though reading the spoiler for how the book ends, I think I like that better but it’s fine.

 

Wait, you prefer that books premise over the movie? The movie handled it perfectly imo and from what I read from the book it ended 

 

Spoiler

Devastatingly and has no real conclusion. 

 

I thought this movie was a solid 8. Ending was much better.

[TheLeon]

I think this story works better with more ambiguity, but also I really didn’t need to see 

Spoiler

That adorable little girl get shot in the face

so I’m glad some changes were made from the book.