There was a time that I thought writer/director M. Night Shyamalan was going to be my generation’s Steven Spielberg. Shyamalan started out his career by writing and directing two forgettable films but on his third he struck gold with the modern day horror-classic The Sixth Sense (1999).
Not to be outdone he followed up that flick with two more great movies — the first was Unbreakable in 2000 and the second Signs in 2002.
If The Sixth Sense was horror then Unbreakable was a unique take on superheroes, released right at the start of the second wave of hero movies in the early 2000s, and Signs was his take on the sci-fi War of the Worlds. And for someone like me who was, and is, crazy about genre movies I was in heaven.
Because of its twist The Sixth Sense was a movie that demanded to be seen more than once, which many people did as it was the second highest grossing movie in 1999 bested only by first Star Wars movie in 16 years. And while Unbreakable didn’t make nearly as much as The Sixth Sense did at the box office, it was none-the-less one of the movies people were talking about a lot in 2000 as being a great movie and the start of something special for Shyamalan. And Signs, a movie I saw twice in the theater, did almost as well as The Sixth Sense which led many to believe, myself included, that Shyamalan was on this way to becoming a new Spielberg.
But the years after Signs left Shyamalan trying to get back some of the magic from earlier films in his new ones.
The best from this bleak period would be The Village (2004), but even this movie about a group of settlers in the 1700s dealing with monsters who attack their village felt overdone in trying to capture a “twist” ending which Shymalan had become known for by that point. I remember defending the movie at the time as being not bad, but it certainly wasn’t on the level of his previous work. Then came Lady in the Water, a terrible movie about a water nymph at an apartment complex which left me scratching my head and questioning if Shyamalan was as good as a writer/director as I thought he was, let alone the next Spielberg.
If his disaster of a disaster movie The Happening didn’t wreck his career, then big budget flops like After Earth and The Last Airbender would. On the one hand Shyamalan’s earlier works showed that he was a writer/director of great talent, but it seemed like he spend the next ten years trying to prove this to be not a fluke but failing in the process.
Then came Split in 2016.
I saw the trailer for this movie about a person with multiple personalities, one of which is a super-strong homicidal monster, and thought it looked great, and the reviews started coming in saying it was something special. It turned out that Split was a secret sequel to Unbreakable.
And in the first time in more than 15 years I was excited about Shyamalan again.
I remember when Unbreakable was released there was talk that it was the first of a planned trilogy of films so I was expecting to see Unbreakable 2 just a few years after the first. I had no idea it was going to take more than a decade and a half for the sequel to be released.
And now comes the final film of the trilogy Glass. Named after the Samuel L. Jackson super-genius villain character from Unbreakable, Glass looks to pit modern-day superhero David Dunn (Bruce Willis) against Glass as well as multiple-personality Beast (James McAvoy).
While I no longer think that Shymalan is going to be the next Spielberg anymore, I also don’t think that matters. As long as Shymalan keeps making good genre pics like Split, and hopefully Glass, I think that Shymalan is going to be his own writer/director and will continue making interesting movies.
And that’s better than being the next Spielberg.
