I want to see M. Night Shyamalan’s Santa’s Village.
Beware Red, for that is His Color.
We do not look in the top of the Hall Closet
We leave Milk and Cookies, but we hide when He comes down the Chimney
I’ve said several times that Shyamalan boxed himself into making a certain type of movie, one he’s run out creative juice for.
I loved Sixth Sense, and liked Unbreakable a lot. Since then, he’s made inreasingly silly movies. BUT, while I thought ***Signs ***was silly, I actually enjoyed it a great deal, because much of it was very funny. Not MST3K “so bad it’s funny,” but just flat out funny.
Not surprising, really. Remember, he got his first big break as the screenwriter for Stuart Little!
So, I’ll repeat what I’ve been saying: Shyamalan DOES have talent. He just needs to stop making chillers, ESPECIALLY thrillers with a twist. He really ought to do a 180, and make a comedy. I think he might pleasantly surprise people and win fans back if he did.
I think that’s possibly a good idea (it could suck majorly, but it would suck in a different way most of his other recent movies have sucked).
In a way, it seems to me that the problem with Shyamalan is that there’s clearly some genuine talent there—if he was just an all-out hack, people simply wouldn’t care as much. But with Shyamalan, there’s always this sense that he could have done something good, but for some reason, didn’t. You feel let down in a way. I think there’s some truth to the idea that he got too big to quickly, and got stuck in a mold, before he had time to truly explore where his creative juices might drive him; it might have been better if he’d made a couple of mediocre movies in different genres, rather than trying to chase that first huge breakthrough success.
I think Shyamalan could do a “thriller with a twist” – it’s his specialty. He just needs one that won’t seem abysmally stupid.
Like do one that someone else wrote.
At the end of the article is turns out…
His career has been dead the whole time.
His career has certainly changed. He did* After Earth* which was a big budget movie but was certainly not billed as a M. Night Shyamalan movie. It was Will Smith all the way. I have not seen it so I can’t comment on it.
Next it looks like he is working on a TV show called Wayward Pines. The premise looks good and the cast is great.
I actually like movies that are somewhat slow-paced and moody, which is why MNS seems to be going for. I like supernatural/sci-fi/superheroes. I like the directors he says he’s emulating. So I should love his movies.
The problem is that there’s so rarely a real payoff there. I like those kinds movies because they give you time and fodder to think about them while they’re happening, but there’s not enough to think about there. For example, I would have loved Signs, The Village or The Happening as a 22-minute Twilight Zone or 44-minute Outer Limits episode. But a feature film? It’s like serving a bowl of beef broth and calling it a stew.
So I won’t say I’ve hated anything he’s done, but my NetFlix ratings of his movies are mostly 3 and 4 stars. There never were any home runs. He’s just not as good as he thinks it is. The surprise to me is that Hollywood ever bought into it.
I think he’s a victim of huge early success, in many ways.
Sixth Sense was phenomenal, Unbreakable was pretty good. Signs is AMAZING but got criticized because people were expecting a hard sci-fi movie for some reason, instead of a character story about the nature of faith. I thought the Village was great too, but many people dislike that one for some reason. (either the twist was too unlikely, or too obvious, take your pick)
Lady in the Water was kinda lame, but not worth ridicule. It just wasn’t as good as his earlier work. The Happening was truly terrible, not sure what happened there.
The public seems to rejoice in watching the mighty tumble, so I think although his later work is not up to his early standards, he gets far more grief than he deserves.
I liked The Village.
Unbreakable was pretty good, for what it was.
Unfortunately what it was was half a movie. It was like if Fight Club abruptly ended right after Ed Norton figures out he’s Tyler Durden, and we were given the rest of the story via blurbs on title cards. Somehow Mr. Shyamalan had not figured out that a revelation is not the same thing as a resolution.
I didn’t know he was the screen writer for Stuart Little. What a difference from his thrillers.
There are a couple of blatant problems in Signs, that everyone recognized right away when the movie came out, that point, I think, to one of M.N.S.‘s main weaknesses as a film maker.
The issues were: the Achilles’ heel of the Aliens (water is like acid to them), and the fact that an Alien capable of threatening us, even in his naked, water-sensitive state, can’t easily get out of a locked pantry.
I suppose M.N.S. was influenced by “Alien Nation” (1988), in which the smarter and stronger than human Aliens had a susceptibility to sea water (which I think makes more sense than just water), it was like acid to them, too.
I bring these two points up because I feel that M. Night is hobbled by a child-like perception of reality. This may contribute positively to his talent for creating a mood of impending dread, but it hampers him when he obviously isn’t thinking his ideas through to logical conclusions … like, if the Aliens are dissolved by water, why run around naked on a farm where crops are irrigated, and dew presumably forms on the grass in the evening, (and where garden hoses may be conveniently located near entrances of the farm house … to them, that’s like flamethrowers guarding the home they are intending to invade.)
And yes, these terrifying Aliens can’t kick out the door of a pantry … indicating to me that M. Night can’t get out of the pantry either, and just presumes a scary lizard-man that can jump up to a roof top and easily outrun the average human can’t smash through a wooden door.
M.N.S. inventing what he thinks are clever plot points because they resolve plot issues or create tense situations, but anyone with much life experience would see them as naive misjudgements, in my estimation, as though a child contrived the scenarios.
No offense to Mr. S. intended, but these few examples from “Signs” suggest to me that a very smart young man from a privileged upbringing, having encountered precious few hardships or threats in his upper middle class life, used his gifted imagination to create truly creepy situations with great atmosphere, but didn’t have the “gritty, real life” experiences necessary to breathe “life” into the scenes … like a nightmare, all very scary, but like a dream, not really logical or realistic, so in the end, not very convincing.
I actually always thought (but have no real evidence to support it) that the water-soluble aliens in Signs were inspired by the aliens from War of the Worlds, which eventually got killed off by the common cold, sort of underscoring their alienness: they are the ultimate other to us, but, in consequence, can’t even exist in the environments we consider normal.
I still thought that a raincoat shouldn’t be beyond a spacefaring civilization’s capacities.
The real question is – why would advanced aliens land on a planet three quarters covered by dealdly poison to them, and continually raining deadly poison on the remaining one quarter?
Also, what kind of opposition did they execpt if they could not anticipate the natives hitting them with, um, various hard things?
Unbreakable was good. I won’t dispute that it was half a movie, but it was a good half a movie, and a well done origin story.
By thinking you need an entire dance troupe to throw one little rock. Bending wasn’t supposed to be a little dance you do to power up your combo meter, it was meant to have a 1:1 relationship between your movements and the magic.
I like most of his stuff. Airbender was good, and I happen to have the good fortune to know Noah Ringer.
All in all, Shyamalan provides sufficient entertainment bang for the buck for me.
I’ve never really understood these criticisms.
- You aren’t told why the aliens landed on Earth but it doesn’t really matter, does it? Yes, the Earth is mostly water. But water’s no good for US, either, and we live here. Drop a human into a random place on Earth and 70% of the time they drown, and a pretty good chunk of the other 30% they freeze or dehydrate. Presumably, there aren’t that many livable planets to invade and the aliens just took their chances, so what?
I mean, humans do this shit too. The death rate among the early colonists in North America was something like 75%.
- The aliens are not unusually susceptible to being hit with bats, it just happens that Joaquin Phoenix’s character was a baseball player and there was a baseball bat there. We see no evidence that beating the shit out of the alien with a baseball bat was how anyone else dealt with them. The point of that is that it connect to the dying wife’s final words; why she said that we do not know for sure, but they inspire Mel Gibson’s character to remind his brother of the weapon he has at hand.
I did not know that having water sprinkled on me would result in my death. Thank you, I’ll be much more careful. 
Forget “sprinkled.” Your body is composed of 75% water. Your are an Alien and don’t even know it!