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.
posted by Kid Showbusiness @ 6:34 AM
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At this point my reputation for "liking everything" has devolved into the level of farce. Not only is it exaggerated beyond repair by my closest friends, but means my opinion on just about anything like this is usually dismissed as a matter of course.
With that said, allow me to launch some small, qualified, defense of Shyamalan.
I couldn't agree more that the marketing of his films prevented anyone from sitting down and watching The Village with any kind of objectivity, and that if you could market it more in the way you summed up its meaning, you'd have a very good film about the nature of civilization.
The point I'd like to make is that perhaps you, Jordan, could watch (or re-watch as the case would be with Signs) his films with that attitude.
Maybe you would have to see Signs through my eyes to really appreciate it. I relate to Mel Gibson's character so much. Maybe the scenes that stick in your mind the most are the aliens sneaking around the corn fields, and you judge it by the strength of those scenes--but to me, the first thing that comes to mind is that conversation Gram has with his brother on the couch. Here are two world views I have struggled with all my life.
It is, put simply, the human condition. That we cannot know if the universe is an uncaring void, or if there is something watching out for us.
The only supernatural thing that occurs in Signs are those three words his wife says as she is dying. Intrinsically, there's nothing supernatural about an alien invasion. It's completely incidental to the truly fantastic notion that somehow, somewhere, there was a force beyond our ability to comprehend that wanted that family to survive.
There was a time in my life when the the hole that religion left in my life was still a wound that hurt. When Gram tells his brother through tears that the lights in the sky terrify him, it's not because they're aliens bent on destruction. It's because of his world view.
And in the end, that's the battle we see play out. Not humans vs. aliens, but an uncaring universe vs. ...something else. Faith. I'd give anything to have the moment that family had, where they were able to peek their head up above the clouds of the human condition, and see that there is something more. I honestly don't think I've ever watched Signs all the way through without crying--and that adds up to 3 times in theaters and few more times on TV... so that's what movies are for. We can't have that moment in reality, but we have a good cry, and we go on.
If you can see The Village as more than just a horror movie, but rather a film about the nature of civilization, and I can see Signs as film about the nature of the human condition, then maybe you could see the rest of them as something more.
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