Something about this movie keeps me coming back.

You could argue that this movie is nonsensical hooey.

But there's something transfixing, beautiful even, about certain scenes and moments. Even the bulk of the film. It's so innocent, so wistful. And the cinematography and music take your breath away.

It's annoyingly, needlessly complex, yet as simple as (no pun or anything of the kind intended) a bedtime story.

Certain scenes in the movie are absolutely ridiculous - everybody reading the "arcane message" off the cereal box is as unintentionally silly as any scene I can think of - but there's nonetheless something beautiful about this film. It's like a plunge into a pool (again, no lame puns intended) of whimsical mysticism, intent on solving the meaning of life within its pages.

Yet there's no excusing the completely superfluous critic character, who ends up dying and then is never mentioned again. Just laughable, awful writing; and the fact that he was demonized so viciously is ridiculous too. Also I've read interviews where Shyamalan talks about the film being an allegory for the process of storytelling, and that the critic character is his way of "killing off internal critics"; and while that makes sense to a point, it still doesn't excuse how the critic is portrayed. Allegories need to be interesting in their own right.