The Rise And Fall Of The Unbreakable Man

Warning:
Contains spoilers for Unbreakable, The Sixth Sense, The Happening, The Empire Strikes Back and Swimming Pool.
Plus, some dodgy opinions regarding Zooey Deschanel

For many, The Sixth Sense is a truly great film. It's a tightly woven masterpiece where everything hangs together like silk bedsheets. The twist - that Bruce Willis is actually a ghost for much of the film is clearly signposted for the keen-eyed viewer. Like all good twists, it reshapes the movie before your eyes without deconstructing it. It makes you want to go back and revisit it with the knowledge of what the twist is so you can soak up all the clues.

For myself, I twigged to the twist about halfway through the film. It's when Brucie goes to visit his wife at dinner. He sits down in the restaurant, but the chair has already been pulled out some ay. He doesn't touch it when he sist down (obviously his arse makes contact, but he doesn't actually handle it). It's a little bit of an odd thing and the first time watching The Sixth Sense, it jumped ut at me. Of course, it helped that I knew there wasa twist and was actively looking for it. Had I not known abut it, like the twist at the end of Charlotte Rampling/Ludivene Sagnier starrer Swimming Pool, that Sagnier is actually some sort of spectral echo of Charles Dance's lover from the early eighties, it would have been even more devastating.

However, The Sixth Sense, a hugely elaborate piece of celluloid sleight of hand that it was, was a huge success. But then Shyamalan fell into a trap. He became The Twist Man. Unbreakbale ended with the revelation that Samuel L Jackson's Mr Glass was Brucie's nemesis and that he had engineered dozens of accidents purely to find the Unbreakable Man. It remains Shyamalan's best film, and the most original superhero movie ever made. At its heart it never forgets about the human element, always a strong factor in any Shyamalan film. It's not really about saving the world, it's about two people who have forgotten how to communicate.

Signs, however, is where it all falls apart. Like The Happening, his latest offering, Signs is all about the invasion of the everyday. In The Happening, it's malevolent plants, in Signs it's amore prosaic alien invasion. For some reason it's a movie which is inexplicably popular with the mainstream crowd. For them, this is probably how an alien invasion would occur. And I will admit to being impressed by it when I was in the pictures. However, it's one of those movies that, as soon as the lights come up, you start to question elements of the film. Unlike The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, it falls apart in the analysis. They find a way of defeating the aliens and don't immediately broadcast it? They have an extremely violent reaction to water but are harvesting humans who are something like eighty percent water?

Of course, it's perhaps not so much about the logistics of an alien invasion as it is Shyamalan's comment on the all powerful nature of God (or a movie director). But even that metaphor is delivered in such a ham fisted manner that it would shame a sixth form student. Everything is laid out in such signposted terms (no pun intended) that a five year old child with learning difficulties would understand it. Unfortunately Signs had a 12 rating.

In fact, Signs so upset me that I still haven't been able to watch The Village all the way through (my patience wears thin at around the forty minute mark, by which point pretty much nothing has happened - in his first films Shyamalan's mannered and elegiac pacing was a virtue, a glorious antidote to the overpumped plotting and relentless pace of most other movies, now it just seems dull) and although I do own a copy of The Lady In The Water, I can't work up the interest to watch it, not even with the ever-delightful Bryce Dallas Howard as the eponymous Lady.

But I went to see The Happening at the pictures. It's one of the benefits of having an Unlimited card; I can go and see pretty much anything I like and if it's dross it doesn't really matter because it's not like I have spent six and a half quid on a ticket to see it. Of course, the two main reasons I went to see it were A) Nobody seemed to have a bloody clue what it was about; the best theory I could come up with from watching the trailer was that it was some kind of Jericho-esque movie about the end of the world and a whole bunc of characters being stranded somewhere. And B) Zooey Deschanel was in it. Not only is she absolutely gorgeous and possessor of the most amazing eyes you will ever see, but she's also a truly talented actress. Now that Maggie Gyllenhaal is spoken for in the DC Comics world, can I suggest Zooey as a replacement for Lois Lane?

So I goes to see it. It's about plants producing a gas which makes people kill themselves. Alright. Fair enough. I'm a science fiction/fantasy fan. I can buy that. It's a bit of a stretch to have people kill themselves in such a controlled manner (one early, brilliant, scene has people just walking off the edge of a building - this I can dig, but then we have people slitting their wrists, or a cop shooting himself in the head, then someone else picks up the gun and shoots themselves in the head and so on - it's a little too much to believe that this gas which makes people go crazy would also allow them to act in such a premeditated manner).

There's a lot made of mobile phones going off (this is a big thing in the trailer, hence my theory of end of the worldness). But it's never explained. In fact, during the film, mobiles work when it's convinient for them to work. So, Luigi off of Super Mario Bros. can't contact his wife, necessitating a trip to Princeton, but once he's there, a woman can contact her daughter just long enough for Marky Mark to find out that everyone's dead.

Yes. Everyone. Even though he's only spoken to one girl, who is inside her house, he concludes that 'everyone' in Princeton is dead. And it's not a small place. In fact, according to some sources, Princeton has a population somewhere approaching 30,000. Has she gone and knocked on all the doors? Or is Shyamalan engaging in cheap info-dump tactics so that Marky Mark will know that Luigi is dead?

It's the latter of course. This is one of those movies where the world outside the frame doesn't exist (apart from those moments of pure amatuerishness where a boom mike bobs about in shot, once for at least five long seconds). It's exactly the opposite school of film-making to something like Star Wars or Lord Of The Rings where the world building (a massively underrated factor in creating a believable world that is not our own) suggests that what we are seeing is just a teeny weeny fraction of what is out there.

And the ending. Endings are difficult, especially to apocalyptic stories. Here, Shyamalan wipes out most of the East Coast in a laboured metaphor relating somehow to environmental issues (it's ironic that a movie that is so concerned with the environment and the threat mankind poses to nature should spend so much of its running time in green fields) and yet, at the end (after of course the gas has simply disapated, leaving our heroes alive, a deus ex machine of the worst kind, one that is both undramatic and blatantly telegraphed) 'three months later' as the caption informs us, everything is back to normal.

As if.

Seven years after the events of 9/11, an event that is probably one of the sources of The Happening's genesis (the first 'attack' is centered around Central Park in New York and is initially reported as a terrorist attack, something that brings to mind the WTC with a bitter taste in the mouth), we're still feeling the aftershocks. Surely something of the nature of The Happening (and just a quick word about the inanity of that title, it's so vague as to be absolutely pointless - it wouldn't be so bad if it was used in an ironic sense, like Jospeh Heller's superlative novel Something Happened, but you know, I suspect that Shyamalan doesn't have a sense of humour, the one moment of comedy in the entire movie - Marky Mark having a conversation with a tree before realising that it is in fact plastic, is tellingly his best best of acting in the movie, and we all know he can act, Boogie Nights taught us that, it's just that he needs a great director to coax the performance out of him and Shyamalan isn't that) in which millions of people surely died (the first incident occurs in New York City, home to about, ooh, ten million people on an off day) the entire country would be devastated, both socially and economically. But that doesn't quite fit in with the story that Shyamalan wants to tell, which, at it's rather illshaped heart is the maturation of Mark Mark and the triumph of the family unit, even if the aforementioned unit is thirty-three percent adopted daughter. So there's a happy ending. It's like ending a romantic comedy with the two lovers finally getting together and admitting that they are made for each other and then having one of them jump in front of a train. Except not as dramatic.

Peace out.