The Tale of M. Night Shyamalan

On this one, I’m switching from my previous sports theme and maybe trying to expand the audience of this currently small-time blog. When my good friend Michael T, said he reads my blog, I began to consider that others of my friends may be doing the same, and some of them may be female. Perhaps they don’t want to read my insights on the NBA Draft or David Ortiz. So, this is something that might interest more people. I will begin to show a little more variety with these posts, maybe I’ll touch on something that can interest more people.

He was Hollywood’s young, rising star, but quickly has become an elaborate, and predictable sideshow in the eyes of his critics. M. Night Shyamalan has hit a wall. He wowed viewers with a gripping yarn about a child who can see the dead and then shocked us into numbness with his surprise ending in the film The Sixth Sense. He followed up that smashing success, which was number two at the box office in the year it was released, by bringing comic book characters to the real world in Unbreakable, which was another hit at the box office and with the critics. Two big-grossing films in a row gives a director enormous clout in Hollywood, and the fact that Shyamalan also wrote these films added to his growing fame. It is conceivable that a director could be handed a poor script to work with, but it seemed far less likely that Shyamalan could lose his magic.

In his third major film, Signs, he didn’t lose that magic at all. He took a different spin on the alien-invasion story by focusing on a rural family, the average family in most people’s eyes. It was a refreshing look at what is becoming an over-used plot in Hollywood. Normally an invasion film focuses on some aspect of the government, where the viewer is all knowing as to what is happening. Shyamalan presents confusion, and doubt in his tale, which seems like a much more likely scenario in the real world. Are aliens really invading the planet? Is what the viewer is asking himself or herself throughout the film, and as usual, Shyamalan reveals all the answers in a twist of an ending. At this point, Shyamalan had reached legend-like status in Hollywood. It was his third major success, and his name, not just the intrigue from his movie trailers was beginning to draw people to his movies. The film was pegged as M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, much like “A Steven Spielberg film” or “The fourth film by Quentin Tarantino.”

After Signs is where Shyamalan has appeared to begin to struggle with film. Or more specifically, film writing. His fourth film was The Village, a film that I enjoyed for its technical aspects, and for the revelation at the end, but did lack in the dialogue and was not as nearly suspenseful as his previous three films. And now, he brings us A Lady in the Water, which has been torn apart since the first trailers hit the Internet. I have not seen the movie yet, but I am planning on seeing it, because, technically speaking, I think Shyamalan is still a film genius.

What I think has gone wrong with Shyamalan is that he has hit a wall in his writing. It has happened to the best writers; it has probably happened to all writers, myself included. I took a poetry class this past year at college, and I was writing so much, that eventually I just hit a wall. I had nothing left, and I would come up with an idea that I thought would be good, but I couldn’t find the words that would make it right. I think the same has happened to Shyamalan. The idea behind The Village was superb in my mind, but he couldn’t quite get the words right along the way. He has always had his struggles, for example his dialogue has always left something to be desired in all of his films, but his technical feats with camera angles and that mysterious element of suspense have always been able to overcome that. I think his visual tricks are beginning to wear thin on the viewers and the holes in his stores are beginning to be pointed out more and more. I see him right now like I see author Dan Brown. They are both great at what they do, and I will still see/read whatever they put out (for the time being), but both have begun to fall victim to their own great formulas. If you read all four of Brown’s novels you realize that they all are written under the same formula, so the “surprises” and “twists” don’t have the same impact that they would normally have. The same is true for Shyamalan now. He is going to confuse you, be very vague in the beginning and middle of his films, and flash a lot of nifty camera angles (by the way, how he reveals himself, he appears in all his films, in The Village, as well as a murder scene, are worth the price of renting the movie, they are amazing scenes) so you, the viewer don’t get bored with what is going on in the plot. He’ll have you thinking one thing, leading you on, and then at the end of the film, something different will be true, or something that you never even considered to be true will emerge as a fact in his plot line. Yes, you will be surprised by watching all of his movies (even though I haven’t seen the latest, I’m betting on a twist at the end), but he is becoming predictable with that writing technique. I think that for his next film, he should really surprise the audience and change his storytelling technique, and maybe not throw us a twist at the end. That could be his biggest surprise of all.