*Spoiler Alert*

M. Night Shyamalan has had his fair share of hits and misses throughout his still young career as a triple threat (writer, director and producer). Whether you see him as the next Hitchcock or a failing Lucas, one thing is for sure about Shyamalan – he’s got a gift, he just doesn’t always know how to use it.

Almost ten years ago, Shyamalan delivered his first big budget twisted thriller, The Sixth Sense, starring Bruce Willis and potential child phenom named Haley Joel Osment. The movie went on to become Shyamalan’s break through writing and directing debut. The biggest aspect of the movie came in the film’s surprise ending – if you don’t know what I’m talking about than you’ve either been living under a rock for the past decade or you just outright hate Shyamalan. Bruce Willis’ character ended up being a ghost that only Osment’s character could see, and the rest is history. You know, the whole, “I see dead people” blabber? To this day most people, including myself believe The Sixth Sense was not only Shyamalan’s first real shot at Hollywood, but that it is also his best film to date.

Anyway, a year and a half went by and Unbreakable hit movie theaters across the nation. Again, Bruce Willis was the star character, except this time there wasn’t a cute and scared little boy acting along side him. Rather, Samuel L. Jackson filled the shoes of the other big name actor. The trailers for the film had people from all over blown away with mystery. A man who survives one of the worst train wrecks in history without even a scratch or broken bone to be seen. The idea for the film was something new and mysterious, and once again people were treated to a surprise ending – Bruce Willis’ character is invulnerable to pain, has super strength but a fear of water – basically the film was an undercover superhero movie, and as a result many people were filled with mixed feelings.

Another couple years passed, and in 2002 Shyamalan released his third mysterious film – Signs, starring Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix. Once again, the film had a really eerie and intense trailer, where crop circles had begun showing up all around the world, causing panic and signaling some kind of potential coming. The movie turned out to be about aliens, which didn’t come as too much of a surprise for people, and once again it delivered one of Shyamalan’s patented twist endings – that everything happens for a reason. Once again, people had mixed feelings of like and dislike for the film’s unique twist. Many people loved the first 2/3’s of the movie but didn’t necessarily like the last 1/3. Others thought the plot was interesting but didn’t like seeing the actual alien because it took away from the scare factor. You could include me into that majority; regardless, Shyamalan’s Signs helped bring his status as a great writer and director back to the lime light for awhile. It was really interesting to see how he conveyed the story of an alien invasion through the perspective of one small town family.

Once again, two years went by and Shyamalan was about to release his scariest looking film to date – The Village (2004), once again starring Phoenix, along with a larger cast of well-known actors and newcomer Bryce Dallas Howard. Just like Shyamalan’s previous trailers, The Village didn’t give much explanation to what the story was actually about; however, it showed scenes of wild beasts attacking a small 1800’s looking village. The trailer looked amazingly scary and everyone thought that Shyamalan was finally expanding his title as thriller newcomer, a title that made him so popular with The Sixth Sense. So what was the outcome of The Village, obviously scary right? Nope, not even close. The Village, up until this point had been Shyamalan’s biggest failure. People weren’t scared because the movie wasn’t anything like they expected and once again there was that damn twist, yet even this twist was too easy to spot early on in the film. So it was back to the drawing board once again for Shyamalan.

I remember seeing The Village in theaters when it was released and being furious that I spent the $6 to go see it. However, about two months ago I had an unusual yearning to see it again. I thought maybe there was something I missed, or that maybe I was too hard on it. So I went out and bought it for $5 and watched it for the second time. After my second watching I still wasn’t entirely sold on the film and the choices that Shyamalan made, yet I had to give him credit because the film itself was based on a really fresh, unique and interesting idea. The concept of people from a grief counseling clinic in the 1970’s, who had lost loved one’s in their life due to murder, starting their own private and peaceful village in modern America is actually quite creative. Even the dialogue, which I hated when I first watched the film in theaters, fits with the eerie 1890’s vibe that the movie presents. Not to mention that the acting is excellent – I could actually buy into the characters’ roles. Overall, I had to reevaluate my initial reaction and give The Village a thumbs up.   In 2006, Shyamalan attempted to take his director and writer status to a whole new level with the film Lady in the Water, a fairy tale that Shyamalan thought up entirely himself. Unlike many of Shyamalan’s previous films, Lady in the Water was suspected to be supernatural from the very beginning. Sporting a quirky cast of characters all living in a small apartment complex ran by Paul Giamatti, a mysterious girl emerges from the apartment’s swimming pool one night. Giamatti rescues her and hence the fairy tale starts. The young girl from the pool (Howard) is a Narf (water faerie) and she is trying to help change the world for the better, yet she is being hunted by Scrunts (vicious beasts). Once again, there is a twist that explains how various people in the apartment complex are actually undiscovered characters in this supposedly old Korean fairy tale who must help Howard (Narf) return home…by way of a giant eagle? What?

Needless to say, Lady in the Water didn’t hit the right chord with many, if not all of its viewers. To this day, it stands as Shyamalan’s overall most criticized film attempt. Even though I wasn’t a particular fan of the movie, I do have to admit that the man has balls. He tried to completely create and film a whole new fairy tale. Yes, it didn’t end up working out for him in the end, but you’ve got to admire his willingness and dedication to do what he loves.

   So how did Shyamalan’s latest blockbuster The Happening hold up – finally another smash hit like The Sixth Sense or simply a failure to be added to the list with Lady in the Water? Well, I’d have to say it’s more like The Village…somewhere in-between good and bad.The Happening, which stars Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel and John Leguizamo, is a film that had the potential to be great but suffered from a few bad decisions on Shyamalan’s part. Plot – people all around North East America begin dying through suicide because of what everyone thinks is an airborne terrorist attack. However, as the movie goes on, the viewer learns that it isn’t a terrorist attack, but that it is nature, the world, more specifically plants, fighting back by releasing a chemical to kill off the inevitable threat that humans have caused to the planet. It’s as if the Earth is cleansing itself from humans, who have harmed and destroyed it over the last hundreds of years. The idea of a cautionary tale about how humans need to live in concord with nature and take into account global warming, pollution and the ozone layer is a creative idea for a movie – it just wasn’t done very well.

My first complaint about the movie was the cast. Mark Wahlberg did a decent job – he’s getting better with each role he takes. John Leguizamo was great, but he dies off in damn near the first 1/3 of the film – why kill off the best actor so soon? However, my biggest quarrel comes with the casting of Zooey Deschanel. I’ve never seen her in any other movie, so I didn’t know what to expect, but in my opinion she was a horrible choice for the leading lady. I think Shyamalan picked her largely because of her mysteriously large and haunting eyes – where he tried to play off her facial emotions a lot of the time; however, her facial expressions and her dialogue just didn’t do it for me. I can see how it would be difficult for the major actors in the film to play off the idea of being scared of an invisible toxin (visualized by scenes of wind blowing). Constantly running from the wind was the movie’s whole scare tactic, which as you could imagine, just isn’t scary. Shyamalan tried to play off of the gore-like aspect of watching people brutally kill themselves, but it just had an awkward feeling. Some of the suicides were creative – like several construction workers jumping off the roof of a building, yet others were borderline cheesy – like a man jumping into a zoo’s lion den. I think what Shyamalan should have done to increase the scariness of the film is not make the toxin a suicidal disease, but rather make it a disease that makes people want to kill others before they ultimately kill themselves. This way the movie would have been more gruesome and it would’ve created two killers – the toxin and the people it’s infected.

 Another thing that bothered me is that a lot of the characters in the story were underdeveloped, which is something that Shyamalan is typically good at not doing. Most of Shyamalan’s characters in his previous movies have been well-developed and there is decent dialogue; however, in The Happening, Shyamalan just jumped straight into the plot with little character back stories.  Overall, The Happening wasn’t so…umm, happening. The conceptual plot of the movie was creative and innovative (the first movie warning people about global warming and etc. – outside of the documentary An Inconvenient truth) and the cast was decent (outside of Zooey Deschanel). All the ingredients were present, but they were just cooked in the wrong doses causing the finished product to taste funky. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I think M. Night Shyamalan is a very talented writer and director with creative and original ideas. He’s had some great films, some okay films and some pretty bad films. Maybe he set the bar to high with The Sixth Sense, maybe he’s been trying too hard lately, maybe he needs to disregard the whole twist ending and just write a solid film. Whatever it is, I hope he finally fixes it with whatever project he works on next. He’s a young director with a whole lot of years left in the film business…I hope. As always, thanks for reading.  -Dillon (D-Dub) 

Tags: Horror, Lady in the Water, M. Night Shyamalan, O Henry, Signs, surprise ending, suspense, The Sixth Sense, The Village, Unbreakable

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 21st, 2008 at 5:22 pm and is filed under Dillon, Horror, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.