Potential spoilers ahead.
This deserves nowhere NEAR the nasty reputation it got. Shyamalan's made a return to one of the things he does well - creating a creepy atmosphere, even without a very good story. Whether you buy the ending or not, the sight of people calmly and emotionlessly killing themselves is fairly chilling, and Shyamalan handles those scenes well. Although he plays with the gore more than he usually does in his films, he's still more restrained than many other modern horror filmmakers, leaving more to the imagination.
I loved the scene near the end where the two of them decide to leave their safe places to get to each other. There's a great deal of desperate romance in that scene - they know they're going to die. However, the moment directly after that, the voiceover explaining why they didn't die, was one of the sloppiest explanations EVER in the history of movies.
I don't know what people were expecting to see when they watched this, but I suspect it was, once again, The Sixth Sense. Which... it wasn't. On purpose. (Really, people. He's not trying to remake that movie. That's why his other movies aren't good remakes of it.) There *was* no big surprise. As in Signs, Shyamalan focuses on the characters and their reactions to a world gone mad more than just attempting to scare the audience. It may not succeed completely, but it's actually a really good formula for a horror movie. If we see things from the characters' perspectives, if we can get inside their skin and see what disturbs them about all this, then we'll be frightened when they're frightened. Looking at it from an objective box full of stereotypes and cliched endings, it's not that frightening a movie. But the emphasis on "these are real people in the real world" allows the movie to become much better than anyone's giving him credit for.
Effective -- flawed, but effective. 3.5 stars.
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