The thing I am surprised by Shyamalan is that he can not seem to make a decent movie. Not an amazing movie, not a profound movie, not even a box office success. Why can he not sit himself down and make a…well, pretty good movie at least? He seems committed(now) to boring characters in boring situations doing stupid thing and talking like drones.
Look at what Ebert said about him after Signs.
It makes me a little said to remember a time when that was the case about Shyamalan.
Did I get whooshed? If not, where is the evidence for this?
I haven’t seen any of his later movies, so I can’t speak to them. I believe he cares about the ideas and the symbolism in his movies, and expects his viewers to be symbolists as well, not horror or sf or thriller movie afficiandos who care about believeable monsters and plot. In that way, he thinks of himself as literary and not genre in his approach. I thought “The Village” was his commentary on the way many Americans responded to 9-11, and as such I thought it was a better commentary than so most newspaper articles and editorials on isolationism and obsession with being safe and the price we pay when we chose safety over freedom. Or would have been, if it weren’t so dang long.
However, symbolism as Shyamalan uses it in his movies fails because he doesn’t pay enough attention to plot and suspension of disbelief. I don’t think it is because he is too lazy – I think it’s because he doesn’t think it is important, and is beneath him. Fables do not have remotely believable plots or characters, after all, as everyone knows the story exists only to express an idea. Yes, it’s pretentious of him.
The teasers in the beginning of NCIS, especially in the early years, tell complete stories in one or two minutes, the equivalent of 100 word short stories or flash fictions. Shyamalan needs to practice doing the same.
No whoosh. It’s one of the more common fan theories to explain the aliens in the movie. It’s not so much a matter of evidence, as an explanation that fits the observable facts about the aliens in the movie, and about the universe in which the movie takes place. There’s nothing in the movie that directly contradicts the idea, and several things in the movie that make more sense if viewed with this explanation in mind.
There are two strong arguments for this theory. The first is that it ties the aliens more directly into the film’s central theme about faith and God. If the creatures are aliens, the film is asking us to accept two fantastic concepts: an alien invasion, and an active, interventionist deity. If the creatures are really demons, then we have only one fantastic concept: God exists, and is active in the world. It also helps explain why God would care about aliens invading the Earth, but not about, say, Germany invading Poland.
The second argument in its favor is it gives a satisfactory explanation for why the aliens are harmed by water: they aren’t. When they first show up here, water is no more dangerous to them than it is to us. It’s only through an Act of God that it becomes harmful. This also helps broaden the scope of the film’s theme: instead of God just being weirdly interested in this one little farmhouse while the rest of the world goes to pieces, it becomes one small corner of a larger, global miracle. And it ties the aliens’ defeat back to the central theme again. Plus, it entirely sidesteps the “Why invade Planet Acid?” question by removing the concept of other planets from the equation.
There’s no smoking gun for this idea: you don’t ever see an alien drawing a pentagram, or anything like that. I make no claim that it was Shyamalan’s intended meaning. It’s pure fanwank.
And in the process utterly destroys the movie’s central, and only working, theme of regaining faith.
If God has made all water into alien killing acid, then the faith or otherwise of the characters in the movie are utterly meaningless. The aliens would have died within minutes simply form breathing the air in a humid basement.
That means that the actions and motivations of the movie’s characters are pointless, random acts. The decision to splash the aliens with water using a baseball bat isn’t divinely inspired. It can’t be divinely inspired, because that would require that God is weirdly interested in this one little farmhouse while the rest of the world goes to pieces.
It’s as though you believe that The Ring in LoTR was suicidal, and was actively driving Frodo back to Mount Doom so it could die. It explains a few plot points, but in the process it destroys all the concepts and characterisation that work.There was no epic struggle and sacrifice of average people involved, it was all the work of The Ring, and anybody would have been compelled to do it.
Your explanation does the same thing to signs. If God made all water Holy Water then it didn’t matter one bit whether Mel regained his faith, or whether the girl left half full glasses around the house. The ending was inevitable and the beliefs and actions of the characters were meaningless. As such we just wasted 2 hours watching them because no matter what they had done, the ending would have been essentially the same.
Which leaves us puzzling why this particular act. Why not make the aliens harmed by air or by gravity or the sound of human voices or something far more immediate and less arbitrary? And why just Holy Water and not crucifixes, prayers, the name of God or all the other things that nore commonly damage demons?
The explanation just replaces one baffling event with another even deeper one.
But it leaves us asking why the “Demons” were utterly unaware of the existence of God. Instead of invading planet acid, they have for some reason invaded Planet God, which is even more dangerous and capricious. Humans are well aware of the existence of God, his all powerful nature and his dislike of demons, but for some reason supernatural demons that were directly created by him and have personally seen him are utterly unaware of this fact.
Once again, it’s one baffling contrivance replaced by another that is even less comprehensible.
I actually don’t think that theme works very well in the movie under any interpretation, although that’s not strictly speaking the movie’s fault: it’s pretty much baked into the Judeo-Christian-Islamic concept of God.
That problem exists in any interpretation of the movie, though. If the creatures came from a distant world, where they naturally evolved this fatal water allergy… then you still have a creature locked in a humid basement, and not dying from respirating water vapor. Either way, it’s a plot hole. If the water suddenly becomes lethal to them due to the intervention of an intelligent being, though, it’s somewhat plausible that God only altered liquid water, not ice or water vapor. It’s a lot harder to explain that if it’s a natural chemical reaction.
Sure, it can still be divinely inspired. Why couldn’t it be?
You seem to be inverting the plain text of the film, here. Mil Gibson’s family isn’t saved because he regains his faith; he regains his faith because his family is saved. His family is saved because God engineered a series of seemingly unrelated events that, taken together, allowed Gibson’s family to defeat one of the creatures: God compelled Gibson’s brother to always swing as hard as he could at every pitch. He compelled his daughter to leave glasses of water all over the house. He compelled his dying wife to utter a few words of prophecy that helped Gibson connect the dots and kill the alien. I don’t see how adding another step of “Blessing all the water,” suddenly kills the theme.
Mysterious ways. Why does God let the aliens invade Earth in the first place? We see that God has no problem nudging human behavior in subtle ways over long periods of time to achieve his desired result. Why not do the same to the aliens so they never arrive at Earth? If they came from another star, they must have travelled millions and millions of miles to get here, and done reams and reams of mathematical calculations to build an FTL capable starship, plot a course to Earth, and fly there. A couple of divinely inspired rounding errors, and the aliens never get here at all. Yet here they are.
(Actually, it occurs to me that this might be exactly what happened. The aliens were originally trying to get to Tatooine, which they would have conquered easily, and God nudged them into coming to Earth instead, where they didn’t stand a chance. :D)
That is, indeed, one of the things that doesn’t really make sense about Satan, and about demons in general. If God is all knowing and all seeing, it’s pretty much impossible to oppose him. And yet, standard Christian theology holds that there are, indeed, a bunch of creatures that exist solely to try to thwart his will.
It’s really just the problem of evil, which is already all over this film anyway. Why would God create demons to torment mankind? Why would God create a universe in which mankind regularly torments itself? In either interpretation of the film, you’re going to have to deal with one of these questions. And seeing as they’re both essentially the same question, neither interpretation is particularly damaged by it, at least relative to each other.
God himself is a baffling contrivance. The advantage of this theory is that it collects all the baffling contrivances in the film under one heading.
I noticed nobody’s talked about Devil, that Shyamalan movie that came out after that disaster The Happening. Was that movie any good? Did it become a typical MNS movie or was it more of a “normal” movie?
Why did he have to use Japan as an example? Grrrrr.
Anyway, here are viewer ratings taken from Yahoo! Japan Movies for movies he’s done:
(out of 5 points)
After Earth 2.50
The Last Airbender 2.95
The Happening 2.78
The Lady in the Village 2.83
The Village 3.41
The Sign 3.11
Unbreakable 3.17
Sixth Sense 4.31
Stuart Little 3.84
Well, holy water is a traditional symbol. As such, it would contribute toward the religious narrative underlying the apparent sci-fi plot in a way other things would not (assuming this fan interpretation is correct, of course).
And one reason water might have been used instead of crucifixes or prayer is that water can appear to be nonreligious until the twist, whereas the other sorts of weapons against demons are explicitly religious.
I liked the movie personally, but I don’t think it’s sci-fi, and I don’t think people who dislike it are necessarily crazy – like some exotic foods, its sort of a specialized taste.