M. Night Shyamalan

The AV Club had a discussion of artists with the greatest gap between their best work and their worst. Inevitably, Mr. Shyamalan came up, and I posted the following. Enjoy. Discuss?

It does seem pretty clear that the success of The Sixth Sense has had the ultimate effect of poisoning Shyamalan's career. Unbreakable is probably his best film, but people wanted another ghost story and his psychological drama/comic book movie missed the comic movie boom by a good 3 or 4 years. And the backlash against his relying on "twists" was already beginning. Signs doesn't even really have one, unless you count the aliens being revealed as special needs rejects in the last act, and there are complaints about the twist from Signs in this very thread.

The Sixth Sense also established for all time how Hollywood was going to try and sell his movies, no matter what kind of movie he actually made. I feel like Unbreakable definitely suffered because of it's marketing, which seemed to be trying to sell it as a Sixth Sense sequel. Signs didn't need marketing, since at that point Mel Gibson could have filled theaters for a movie solely devoted to 3 hours of increasingly sadistic tortures delivered by actors speaking in a dead language. The Village, however, was absolutely destroyed by the marketing campaign. I went in to that movie expecting that... I don't even know. They were time travelers stuck in the past, or it was the distant future and they were on an alien world... or something! The money guys can only sell a Shyamalan film as a sci-fi horror with a twist, even when there's no sci-fi, and no real twist. SPOILERS:

When your twist is that the monster isn't real and your village is in a nature preserve in Pennsylvania... you probably should try and downplay the twist. The movie's not about the twist at that point. Shyamalan has to take some of the blame for structuring the movie so as to conceal where and when this is all happening, as if that matters, giving the movie a twist for his accountants. The movie should have been about these people that retreated from society and its monsters only to find that they needed to invent new monsters to maintain stability. And that those monsters have suddenly become real.

But the marketing made it seem like the movie was about the mystery: Where is this village? Or maybe... when is it? So, when people find out the "twist", naturally they feel cheated. I still don't know whether or not I really like that movie. The marketing raised expectations that the movie itself was never intended to satisfy. Wasting a pretty fucking terrific cast in the process.

I haven't even seen Lady in the Water or The Happening so I can't comment on them except to say that it seems as though the backlash has gotten to him and is affecting his work.

I did see The Last Airbender and I don't understand all the vitriol directed at that movie. It seemed perfectly competent to me. It wasn't a fantastic movie, by any stretch, but considering the job it was undertaking and the built-in limitations it was forced to accept I think competent was about the most you could hope for. I mean, taking a full season's worth of a mythology heavy cartoon television series and condensing it into one movie is already a fairly difficult feat. The unfortunate fact that your cast has to be about 75% kids/teenagers makes that even tougher, and is probably why Shyamalan got the job in the first place after what's his name in Sixth Sense and the kids from Signs. Considering the task he had to accomplish, I think the results are at least passable. Unfortunately, it seems Shyamalan has used up his store of goodwill.