(narrator) On August 5, 2002, Newsweek ran a cover story on a young Indian filmmaker
who stormed Hollywood with a successful string of films.
The article foresaw a promising career ahead of the upstart director, even suggesting he
was the next Steven Spielberg.
But another theme throughout the article - the director’s ego, would prove more prophetic.
This director, of course, is M. Night Shyamalan, and by the time that magazine was published,
almost everyone knew this film director with his strange foreign sounding name
and his signature twist endings.
After a series of critical flops and box office bombs, Shyamalan went from Hollywood’s most
promising new blood to a filmgoer’s favorite punching bag, his famous twists amounting
to nothing more than punchlines.
But with recent box office success after a few low-budget returns to form, Shyamalan
is experiencing a second life.
But not everyone is on board.
In other words, the director of Split has left the film community split in opinion.
But before I make any grand statements about Shyamalan, his career and his future,
let’s explore the films and events that led us to where we are now, beginning with the middle
of Shyamalan’s career.
Shyamalan’s downward spiral begins with his third film after The Sixth Sense, 2004’s
The Village.
Roger Ebert called the film “a colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise
that cannot support it.”
Ebert is referencing the film’s controversial twist ending where it is revealed that the
pastoral community seemingly from the 19th century is actually an isolated commune in
present day.
This is the first of Shyamalan’s twists that failed to charm most audiences.
I remember watching The Village with a group of friends when I was younger and being the
only person who didn’t mind the twist.
One of my friends couldn’t get over the fact that “If the characters in the film
lived in the present day, how would they not notice normal things like airplanes fly by?”
(Noah Percy laughing and clapping)
It was a fair thought, but at the same time, I kinda felt like he missed the point of the movie.
Focusing on that instead of the beautiful cinematography of Roger Deakins, for instance,
just seemed like the wrong approach.
When I rewatched the film recently, I noticed Shyamalan threw in a line at the end to explain
the airplane plot hole,
(man) "A few years ago, it got out in the papers.
That some government guys have been paid off
to keep plane routes from flying over this place."
(narrator) But, even this was clunky.
But more than the actual film, it was the promotion of the film and the director that
likely explains the turn in opinion, especially among critics.
In a promotional Sci-Fi channel documentary for The Village titled
"The Buried Secret of M Night Shyamalan,"
random celebrities and childhood friends and family of Shyamalan
were interviewed about the director.
The film was cut together to appear as if the director had supernatural powers, as if
he could return from or speak to the dead.
The film was obviously fake, and was later revealed to intentionally be a mockumentary,
but many members of the film community were rubbed the wrong way, and the narrative of
the overbearing film director obsessed with his self-image became to take hold for Shyamalan.
The narrative would only get worse and two years later, when Shyamalan’s next film
Lady in the Water released, the knives were sharp and ready to cut the director apart.
On top of this, Shyamalan did a major disservice to himself and his image as a self-absorbed
egotist when he wrote and casted himself as the film’s savior.
Reviews of the film were brutal and personal.
At the time of release, an anonymous studio executive stated “It feels like the entire
town is rooting for him to fail.
Is there a 12-step program for egos?”
I’m not sure why big egos was all of a sudden a point of contention for critics.
Big heads hadn’t damaged the reputations of many other filmmakers.
In fact, when you go back and read the reviews of Lady in the Water, it’s pretty startling
how many have nothing to do with the film at all, but the director.
Another thing I found odd about the reviews were how literally they took the film.
Lady in the Water (and in large part, The Village, also)
were clearly intended as fantastic metaphors.
Realism was never the intention, but critics still approached the film as if it were a
treatise on realism.
European critics, who tend to be more open to different cinematic approaches, were much
kinder to the film.
So much so in fact, that Lady in the Water as well as The Village were voted in the top
ten films of 2006 and 2004 by Cahiers du Cinema, the world’s most reputed film publication.
Unlike Lady in the Water and The Village, Shyamalan’s next film The Happening was
universally panned.
And like before, the reviews focused more on the director than they did the film.
Ty Burr of the Boston Globe commented, “You feel like you’re not watching the end of
the world but the end of a career.”
Though there are many gripes with the film, if I had to single out the public’s main
concern, it’d have to be that people simply didn’t buy the film’s premise.
In the film, a plague mysteriously surfaces that causes those inflicted to kill themselves.
It’s revealed that trees are the cause for the frenzy.
Audiences ridiculed the film for being a thriller where the villains are vegetation.
But again, it’s clear that Shyamalan didn’t intend a literal-minded approach to the film.
The picture was obviously intended to work in the realm of metaphor.
However, despite the intention, it’s safe to say the film didn’t accomplish its goal
of being the 21st century version of The Birds.
The film is a great reminder of how hard it is to gauge whether a film is working or not.
It’s easier for audiences to discern whether a finished movie works, but in the
creative process, outcomes are much harder to gauge.
A film can have everything going for it, yet still completely fall apart.
A great example of this is the 2013 film The Counselor.
Despite direction by the revered Ridley Scott, a script by literary genius Cormac McCarthy,
and a highly competent cast, the film is a complete disaster.
It’s almost a certainty that those involved in the film would never have predicted the
cinematic catastrophe.
The line between great and awful is sometimes thin,
and during the act of creative expression,
that line is even thinner.
Like The Counselor, The Happening was a failure,
but is there no nobility in originality?
If you look at the highest grossing films of that year, you’ll be overwhelmed with
the sheer volume of sequels and adaptations.
The Happening may have been a fiasco, but at least it didn’t sell out.
The same cannot be said of Shyamalan’s next film.
Not only was The Last Airbender a disaster, it was also an adaptation and an uncharacteristic
sell out for Shyamalan.
To this day, The Last Airbender is the worst movie I have seen in theaters, and it’s
easily the worst film I’ve seen with a budget over 100 million dollars.
It is a film that fails under pretty much any possible critical lens you could view it with.
But more than serve as the defining film of Shyamalan’s career, it’s much more honest
to view The Last Airbender as an exception and it’d be a singular anomaly were it not
for the film that followed The Last Airbender, the Will Smith vehicle After Earth.
Upon its release, Joe Morgenstern wondered
“Is ‘After Earth’ the worst movie ever made?
But we know it can’t be the worst film ever made, because Shyamalan’s film before that
was the worst film ever made.
A better comparison would be the one Rolling Stone editor Peter Travers made when he likened
the film to Battlefield Earth.
Both films were box office bombs and critical flops.
Also, both films were science fiction narratives with deep ties to Scientology, both in the
actors casted as well as the content explored.
Despite critics wishing for his downfall,
no one would’ve guessed Shyamalan’s downward slope.
The three film stretch from The Happening to After Earth is as bad a set of films as
any major film director in history--maybe even the worst.
These films have burnt so bad an image in our collective minds, that people forget about
the director’s early career.
(music playing)