Tag Archives: sixth sense

Under Darkness of M. Night

 

M. Night Shyamalan’s career is something akin to the stock market. After making his Hollywood splash with the Oscar-nominated chiller The Sixth Sense, he was hailed on the cover of Newsweek as the next Steven Spielberg. But since then, his career has seen as many peaks and valleys as The Dow Jones. In anticipation of his trilogy capper Glass, we take a look and rank the dozen films in his career.

The Last Airbender (2010)The Last Airbender

Shyamalan had a reputation of making tight suspense movies that didn’t break the bank: His first seven movies cost less than $75 million. Maybe that’s what made Airbender so disappointing. Despite boasting a $150 million budget, the movie was marked with uninspired performance, shoddy special effects and a script devoid of his trademark flourishes of quiet tension — a far cry from the wildly wildly imaginative Nickelodeon series on which it was based. Savage reviews sealed the movie’s fate — and Shyamalan’s plans for a trilogy.

Lady in the Water (2006)Lady in the Water

One of the biggest disappointments of Shyamalan’s career. Before beginning production on this  fairy tale,  Shyamalan had quite a resume,  with Sense, Unbreakable and Signs under his belt. And with a cast lead by Paul Giamatti, Bryce Dallas Howard and Jeffrey Wright, expectations were stratospheric. Alas, this story about a blue collar Joe trying to save a stranded water faerie return home came off as an exercise in self-indulgent hubris, and sank like a stone with critics and fans.

Praying With Anger (1992)Praying With Anger

While not technically a Hollywood film (Shyamalan started working on his debut film  while still a student at NYU), this was his first true movie: He wrote, produced, funded, directed, and starred in the story of an Americanized young man of East Indian descent returning home to rediscover his roots. While the movie didn’t have the low-budget Blair Witch or El Mariachi debut effect he hoped (the pacing was molasses slow and it showed Shyamalan, who played the lead, is no actor), it did grab the attention of studio execs who saw potential, opening the door for  Sense.

After Earth (2013)After Earth

Credit Shyamalan with guts: Even after the costly debacle that was  Airbender,  Shyamalan wasn’t shy about swinging for the big-budget fences, and Columbia Pictures obliged with  a $130 million budget and Will Smith for this sci-fi adventure. But the story of space travelers stranded on an alien planet played as an empty vessel, a vanity project for Smith and his son Jaden, who showed a surprising lack of chemistry and could not muster, of all things, much emotion to overcome the unimpressive special effects. While star power and overseas grosses helped the movie turn a small profit, the movie never took flight with fans and reviewers.

The Happening (2008)The Happening

Despite a terrific trailer, Happening became a Hollywood punchline about wind being an awful casting choice for a thriller. The story about a teacher, his wife and their friends trying to outrun a mysterious plague has its fans, but primarily among B-movie fans fond of it’s unintentional B-movie quality.

Wide Awake(1998)Wide Awake

Most people don’t even know Rosie O’Donnell starred in a Shyamalan film, but this clunker about a fifth grader who sets off on a search for God after the death of his grandfather is unfortunate proof otherwise. While the movie should have been in the wheelhouse of Shyamalan’s themes of faith, family and identity, the story was too plodding and schmaltzy to get the director back on top of his game.

The Visit (2015)M. Night Shyamalan The Visit

After his fourth straight big-budget misfire in After Earth,  Shyamalan seemed poised for a possible comeback with this 2015 semi found-footage film about teen siblings visiting their grandparents and finding them engaged in some seriously deranged behavior. Too deranged for audiences, who found the movie  claustrophobic, paranoid and just plain bizarre — made more confusingly jittery by the movie’s handheld camera work.  It did, though, earn a 72% on RottenTomatoes and gave  a glimpse into the creepy anxiousness Shyamalan would use so effectively in Split.

The Village (2004)The Village

Perhaps the most underrated film in Shymalan’s oeuvre. Sure, the central conceit is a cheap twist with no clever foreshadowing clues like Sense.  But the mournful story and Gothic themes of grief, fear and the coldness of modern society made for an effective chiller, accentuated by the woods that made up the set and the “creature” that haunted them. Not to mention, it featured Roger Deakins haunting cinematography and a terrific romantic score from James Newton Howard. The movie enjoyed a healthy home video run and warrants a repeat viewing for those expecting something different in theaters.

Split (2017)James McAvoy in Split

While The Visit didn’t quite put Shyamalan back on top,  it proved Shyamalan was ready to tackle the darker, deeper themes that made him a critical darling early in his career. Backed by the risk-taking production house Blumhouse, this story of a man suffering from multiple personalities was a showcase for James McAvoy’s incredible range with voices and characters, and is perhaps the most unexpected entry of a suspense trilogy in recent cinema. It’s a wonderful examination of psychological horror and was the surprise commercial hit of 2017, raking in $138 million, more than three times its budget. It’s also made Glass the most anticipated film of winter.

Signs (2002)M. Night Shyamalan Signs

Sure, it’s too long, and critics had a field day with the twist ending (why would invading aliens, who dissolve in water, invade a planet that’s 70% water and rains regularly?). But Signs became not only a sci-fi masterpiece, but it pulled off the near-impossible at the box office: After dropping from the No. 1 perch its opening weekend, it roared back in its fourth weekend to hold the top spot for three straight,  raking in $227 million by the end of its run. Many consider it Mel Gibson’s finest performance, and made a scene-stealer out of Joaquin Phoenix. It also became that true Hollywood rarity: a religious parable to wear its heart on its sleeve.

Unbreakable (2000)Samuel L. Jackson in Unbreakable

Perhaps the most underrated superhero film in modern Hollywood memory. Coming on the heels of Sense with a cryptic trailer and a shroud of secrecy, Unbreakable set an unreachable bar of expectations, and its $95 million at the box office — $5 million short of the ridiculous $100 million “blockbuster” label requirement — had some media wonks deeming it a disappointment. But it’s eminently re-watchable for the clues it subtly lays out, the sequel-friendly landscape it carves, and still stands as some of the best work Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson have ever done. It’s even got the subtle heart of a family drama, virtually unheard of in today’s superhero universe.

The Sixth Sense (1999)Haley Joel Osment and Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense

Even Shyamalan could not come up with an unexpected twist to this list. What more can be said about a debut that challenges Orson Welles’? Shyamalan’s tale of a soft-spoken 10-year-old who sees dead people comes off as a straightforward horror movie. But the mesmerizing performance of Oscar-nominated Haley Joel Osment, played against Bruce Willis’ wonderfully restrained performance and capped by the confident directing of a Tinsel Town wunderkind, made Sense not only the suspense thriller of the year, but the decade. No matter how many times you watch it, you’ll find a new, subtle clue hinting at its devastating finale.

 

Westworld’s Ctrl+Alt+Del Glitch

 

Westworld was one of those rarities in Hollywood: Entertainment that lived up to its stratospheric hype.

As beautiful as Game of Thrones and as brainy as the first season of True Detective, Westworld reaped the reward of zeitgeist, as its arrival timed nicely with the public’s surging interest in Alexa, Google Home, Siri — and the requisite debate over Artificial Intelligence.

And Westworld timed it all with the precision and thunder  of a  two-handed slam by Lebron James (another phenom who equaled expectations). You didn’t know who was human and who was human-ish. Which stories were real and which were just plotlines. The first season held its own against HBO debuts like The Sopranos, The Wire and Sex and the City. All had second seasons demonstrating freshman year was no fluke.

Alas, Westworld finds itself in a sophomore slump, one of its own design.

Who, exactly, are we supposed to root for in the second season? Season 1 (spoiler alert) culminated in a terrific finale as the machines became self-aware — and bent on revenge on the humans who imprisoned them in the futuristic theme park. It was a great story the first time around (the original movie came out in 1973) and proved just as powerful in the reboot.

Now, however, the show is lost for a hero. Is it the woman leading the cyborg onslaught? The humans who created the victims? Every story needs a reason to care about it. But Westworld still seeks a motivation beyond bloodlust (and the battles are bloody. And often nude.).

The problem is in Westworld‘s primary genetic design. It doesn’t lend itself to long format storytelling.

This is true for all films that rely on a shocking reveal. There’s a reason there was no sequel to The Crying Game (whose hero turned out to be a woman) or The Sixth Sense (whose hero turned out to be dead). Oh yeah, spoiler alerts. Those films realized that when you fool an audience the first time around, you get a more skeptical audience with each new chapter.

And that suspicion is powerful. It nearly ruined the career of M. Night Shyamalan, whose penchant for pulling the rug from under audiences’s feet became the bane of his career. Blade Runner 2049, the much-hyped sequel to the 1982 classic, collapsed under the same “fool me once” strategy. Ridley Scott’s sublime original left us to wonder who was human and who was a “skin job.” But those doubts left last year’s film an unmitigated failure: It cost $150 million and recouped only $92 million.

Westworld‘s own history suggested it was spawned in a troubling loop. MGM tried to milk the original franchise, launching a sequel, Futureworld, and a TV show, Beyond Westworld. The sequel was a critical and commercial flop, never recovering its  $2.5 million budget. The TV show lasted five episodes before it was canceled.

This doesn’t necessarily doom the new iteration. After all, the series smartly recruited Jonathan Nolan, whose short story brother Chris turned into Memento. That story, too, would never warrant a sequel. As in real life, once you learn characters aren’t who they say they are, you’re less likely to invest in their interests.

We get the Westworld message: Artificial intelligence will adopt the same failings as its human architects. But that also means your robots must face larger ethical issues than how to exact revenge. It’s not enough to be self-aware; you must make moral decisions based on that awareness.

And right now, you can’t help but be aware that Westworld’ one-trick pony act needs to learn new stunts.