M. Night Shyamalan

Tonight, I watched Devil, which is the first entry in the so-called "Night Chronicles" by director M. Night Shyamalan. The point of these films are ideas from Shyamalan done by other directors and writers. It's a way for Night to get movies done without having to do all of the work, and it's an idea that I like.

For many others, it was a joke. The story of Shyamalan's success in Hollywood is one that has happened many times before. A figure does something that everyone loves (in his case, The Sixth Sense) and people expect that from him/her from that point on. The "bit" of "the twist ending" became a calling card for Shyamalan for all his movies, and when it "happened" in a couple of his other movies, people immediately turned on him. They said he was stale. That he was repetitive. And that he thought he was God's gift to writing.

I never really understood that. So I want to quickly break down Shyamalan's films and figure out what these people are talking about.

The Sixth Sense - It's Shyamalan's classic movie. Unfortunately, it's also his first. It's a beautifully shot movie, and it's just a great story. I will openly admit, here in front of the six of you that read this, that I cry at the end of the movie. Or, at the very least, tear up. When Cole admits to his mother that he can see ghosts, telling a tear-jerking story about his grandmother, it just hits me every single time. The movie is about acceptance and love more than anything, and I think it has a great message about holding on to the things we really care about...and knowing when to let go.

Unbreakable - This is probably my favorite Shyamalan movie, and it had to grow on me. Coming off his first movie, people expected a lot out of this movie. And, at first, it doesn't seem that great. Bruce Willis is, again, the star of the movie, and he plays a man who learns that he is "unbreakable." Over the course of the movie, you realize that this is a superhero origin film. Willis' character is powerful, strong, and invincible. He even has his one weakness - water. The "twist" at the end is that Samuel L. Jackson's character ends up being the villain of the film.

But that's not a twist if you really watch the movie. It's a comic book story at heart, and every comic book story needs a villain. And there are only, really, about four characters in the movie. Willis, his son, his ex-wife, and Jackson. Plus, the movie is pretty consistent in its superhero story structure, and that means that Jackson had to be the villain. In fact, Jackson's final monologue pretty much tells you why you should've seen it coming. More on that in a bit.

Signs - This is the Shyamalan movie that I struggle the most with. It's an alien film, and it's something that I've never truly bought into. It's a movie I always say that I want to watch again, but I never end up doing it. But I heard something about the movie that might make me appreciate it a bit more.

A lot of the complaints about the movie revolve around the end. After being a pretty scary movie throughout, using darkness and shadows instead of real images, we finally see the aliens in the final few minutes. They look kinda dumb, and they get hurt by water. Kinda like with War of the Worlds, people get mad because something so easy could take down a villain. It seems like a cop out.

But then I heard that the aliens in the movie aren't aliens - they're demons. And then things start to make sense. The whole movie is about faith - Mel Gibson, the star, plays a former priest who lost his faith. He lost his wife, and he can't forgive God. And, through the movie and the attack, Gibson's character learns to trust God again.

So what does that have to do with aliens? Nothing. But if you decide the creatures are demons, it makes sense. Gibson's demons are literally attacking him (and his family), and he has to fight them with the help of his newly-regained faith. I need to watch the movie again for subtleties, but I don't remember anything in the movie that necessarily disagrees with this theory. And, if that's the case, I might run with it. It tidies the movie up a bit.

The Village - So the Sixth Sense had a definite twist ending. Unbreakable really didn't, but I can accept that a lot of people thought it did. Signs definitely didn't. And, yet, because of the twist in his first movie (and assumptions about his twists in his later films), Shyamalan got this reputation for "twist endings." And people started to look for them in his films. Looking for clues instead of watching the movie.

The Village definitely has a twist ending. We learn at the end of movie that the narrative actually takes place in modern times, when we'd been left to believe that it was taking place in the past. There were clues to this fact throughout the movie, and a lot of people figured it out when they were watching it for the first time. And, for some reason, they held this against Shyamalan.

The problem with that is this - it isn't a contest. Shyamalan isn't trying to trick you, and if you figure out the ending, it shouldn't affect the quality of the movie. Ashley says this about movies a lot - if he can figure out the ending before it happens, he criticizes it.

But you can go into the movie Titanic and know how the movie is going to end. The boat is going to die, Kate Winslett's character is going to live, and Leonardo DiCaprio's character is going to die. We know this because the actual boat sank, Winslett's character appears in the present, and DiCaprio's doesn't. It didn't stop the movie from being good, and it didn't stop people from loving it.

But because people figured out the ending to The Village, it gets disqualified. As if the only reason that the Sixth Sense was any good was because it tricked everyone. Which isn't the case...the movie was great whether it ended with a twist or not.

Is The Village great? No. But it has a lot of really good moments, it tells an interesting story, and it keeps your attention. And when you think about the ending and consider what it all means to the characters, it is actually quite thought-provoking.

Lady in the Water - People got mad at this movie because there was no twist. So if he has a twist, it sucks. If there's no twist, it sucks. This was when people were completely turning on Shyamalan, and it started to annoy me.

Is Lady in the Water great? No. But it's also not terrible. If it'd been done by any other writer/director in Hollywood, it probably wouldn't have been beat up that much. It's a nice little film that I've watched and enjoyed enough to watch a second time.

A big criticism of this movie is that Night actually appears as himself in the movie (in a role instead of a cameo this time). And, in the movie, he plays a writer who is told that he will eventually publish something great that will be appreciated after his death. Reviewers trashed this as Shyamalan being egocentric, and they trashed it. They also trashed that Shyamalan had a movie reviewer killed in the film so it might just be sour grapes between the writer and critics.

And people seem to forget that it's supposed to be a fairy tale. But, as you'll see with the next movie, people always seem to forget what Night's actually trying to do.

The Happening - Okay, here's the movie that people really hated. And it's the movie that I seem to go out of my way to defend.

With every DVD, Shyamalan includes one of the films he did as a child. And while it's cool to see the work a great director did before he was famous, he always includes a movie of the same genre as the feature film. So he's not doing it to be cool...I think he's trying to reference the tone of the movie he's trying to do.

The Sixth Sense is a ghost story. Unbreakable is a comic book story. Lady in the Water is a fairy tale. If you know this going in, you enjoy the stories more because he's really writing a love letter to the genre more than anything. It makes his stories formulaic, but that's kinda the point.

People hated The Happening because they thought it was about plants killing people. The problem is that it isn't. And unlike the demon theory for Signs, this is actually backed up by the story.

The first thing you have to know is that, like his other movies, Shyamalan is paying homage to a genre. And the genre in this movie is B-movies from the 1950s. These were movies that were supposed to be shocking, and they were all based on flimsy science. The nuclear age had been thrust upon people, and we had all these nightmares about what it would do to our world. This was the time that Godzilla was thought up. That monsters were coming to life in all shapes and sizes. That people wanted to be scared of the unknown.

The second is that, like in Unbreakable, Shyamalan comes out and tells you what he's trying to do. Except, this time, he does it at the very beginning. The protagonist is played by Mark Wahlberg, and he's a high school science teacher. He brings up a story to his class about the disappearance of honey bees, and he asks his students to think of what could've happened.

And he ends up declaring that there is no answer. That scientists would come up with a theory, and that the theory could be right and could be wrong. That there's a chance that people would never know the true answer, and there's a good chance that the "accepted" answer would eventually be proven wrong.

Then the people start dying. No one knows what's happening, but the main characters decide to flee the cities. Rumors start, and the characters hear that the towns are safer than the cities. That people are safer in smaller groups. And then there's the theory about the plants.

One of the characters believes that plants are fighting back. That they're releasing a toxin into the air that is making people suicidal. And this theory is accepted by most of the characters for the remainder of the movie. And, because of this, it's accepted by the audience.

Here's the problem - people forgot the earlier scene. And Shyamalan even throws in a scene at the end of a haughty scientist proclaiming the plant theory and why everyone should believe it. It's a scientist giving science's official theory, whether it's right or wrong. It's exactly what Wahlberg's character said would happen. But people ignore that and focus on the plants.

And that's my main criticism of Shyamalan critics - they don't pay attention. They don't watch the movies. And they don't ignore their pre-conceived notions of what an M. Night Shyamalan movie is supposed to be.

So when the Night Chronicles were announced, people laughed. When I first saw a trailer for Devil, a big fat guy in the audience openly laughed when Shamalan's name was mentioned and scoffed at the name "Night Chronicles."

But again, they don't see what Night is trying to do. The criticism about Night is mostly about writing. His movies aren't original, his endings are predictable, and that he's lost his touch. Well, Night is removing himself from the equation outside of the ideas. And the ideas are the one thing that I don't think ever gets criticized. You never hear that Shyamalan's movies are bad ideas...just that they aren't executed well.

Well, Night isn't writing these movies. He isn't directing them. And he's not appearing in cameos. He has an idea, and he gives it to someone to make real.

And, still, he gets criticized. I'm not going to say that Devil is a great movie, but it's, again, watchable. And the best part of the film is the idea itself.

Which is the only part of the movie that Shyamalan did.