Formal Film Studies: M. Night Shyamalan

The Legend Himself

M. Night  Shyamalan is probably one of the interesting directors of all time. In the late 90's to early 2000's he was one of the most promising young directors in Hollywood. Theaters would be filled just by having his name on the cover of  a movie. More recently however, his films have been so bad that his name isn't even mentioned in the trailers, posters, or anything else for his movies. The only way to find out the M. Night directed After Earth, his most recent film, is to look it up on IMDb. So how did this director go from making classic films to films people wouldn't even want to be paid to see? Honestly, I have no idea but, lets look into some of his films both  the good, and the bad.

The Sixth Sense

The opening scene from The Sixth Sense

Honestly, The Sixth Sense is one of the greatest films I've ever seen. It was written and directed by M. Night, and was released in 1999. The writing, acting, cinematography and everything else in this movie is absolutely fantastic. This movie easily has some of my favorite scenes of any movie ever. However, it also has some of my least favorite. The movie seems like a constant switch between amazing beautifully shot scenes and scenes that are distracting and take you out of the movie. This movie does a lot of what M. Night does best which is very calm depressing interactions between the characters. In a lot of M. Nights films he has certain characters not show a lot of emotion in scenes. In most conversations in the movie both characters do not speak much and with very little inflection in their speech. M Night chooses to show the emotion through the  faces of the actors and the scenario in which they are placed. In most scenes where one character is very intense and emotional the other actor is very calm. Examples of this are the opening scene (posted above), and the final scene with Cole and his mother in the car. Another thing M Night does in this movie is he keep most of the dialogue between the main characters, not the main characters and side characters. M Night links all of the characters to a central theme of grief and loss. Every character in the movie is haunted by their own demons or in Cole's case others. Even when he introduces other characters into the story they are still bound by that same trait. One example of this is the father watching the tape of his daughter at the funeral. By linking every character in the film to a central theme it allows a special connection between the characters. Although Malcolm and Cole are going  through very different experience  their characters are able to bond and relate over their own suffering. This is just  one example it applies to other characters in the film as well. M Night also does a great job with for shadowing and respecting his audiences intelligence. A good example of this is at one point Cole leaves his house with one of his "friends" and it's implied that the other kid doesn't like him but is only pretending to because his mom asked him to. He doesn't clearly spell out that this is the case but anyone who was watching could very easily imply it. After watching the movie for the second time the movie still makes sense even after you know the twist at the end. There are no moments that don't make sense once you know the twist. Despite this i think a lot of the scene between Malcolm and his wife are a bit hard to believe after knowing how the movie ends. Overall I think this is an amazing movie that was sadly spoiled for me before I could see it.

Signs

This  scene made me cringe so hard

Now if we're being honest here I absolutely hate this movie. Both the script and acting in this movie is god awful and I 100% mean that. While The Sixth Sense was able to pull of calm minimalist acting in order to set a tone throughout the movie Signs fails to do the same thing. Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix sound more bored than anything else throughout the majority of the movie. And when they weren't being boring they were doing incredibly stupid things, like yelling at TVs... Honestly there were just  so many horrible writing and directing choices throughout this movie I don't even know where to begin. First, one of the things that made the Sixth Sense so great was the twist at the end of the movie. It's ability to completely catch audiences off guard and carry such an emotional weight combined with it's ability to make sense with the rest of the story made a great way to end the movie. However, with signs the twist is that the aliens weakness is water. This makes literally no sense because there is water in the air so the aliens would just die from being on earth. Not only that  but there is so much build up to the big twist and honestly it's not very interesting. While the ending of Sixth Sense was emotionally involving the twist here is just a piece of information that helps the main characters end the movie. Unfortunately that's not the only stupid thing in this movie. There are many specific instances where characters make unrealistic decisions that leaves most people just screaming at there TV about how dumb it is. In one scene one of the main characters walks into a room full of aliens without an ax that is sitting just in the corner of the screen. Another problem with this movie is that it isn't nearly scary enough. At many points in the movie you'll find yourself feeling that a scene was supposed to be scary but wasn't at all.The scene I posted at the top is a great example of this. In M Nights other films he's struggled with this same problem. In both The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable in certain scenes I felt that he was trying to scare the audience  but ended up failing. This was much more excusable in these other movies however, because they weren't horror films.Some of the scenes in this movie are actually scary and it helps make up for some of them that aren't.This movie isn't all bad however, the movie actually has a decent amount of good things going for it. It's pretty competently directed and a lot of the shots and cinematography is set up really well. Although there are far to many scenes where the acting isn't great, there are some scenes where it is actually pretty good. 

The Happening

Looks decent right?? Wrong.

As bad as I think Signs is as a movie it still  has a lot of good scenes and you can see that some of what makes The Sixth Sense so great is still in this film. The Happening however, has no redeeming values what so ever. If you sat someone down with this movie, without telling them who directed it, and asked them who directed it, there is no way they would respond M Night Shyamalan. I think this was undoubtedly the film that ruined M Night's career. When this movie was released it had a huge advertising campaign with short ads playing on TV and movies with just the view of hordes of people jumping off of buildings and the title of the movie "The Happening". Almost nobody knew what this movie was about they just knew it was directed by M Night and it looked awesome and terrifying. It was all set up to be the next great horror movie but then, it came out. The first thing you should  know about The Happening is that it is NOT a horror movie. Despite every trailer and advertisement making it seems this way it was not even in the slightest. The Happening is more of a mystery movie I would say but it's hard to nail it down to just one genre. The mystery of  The Happening however is not in the plot, because the answer to that is plants, but more in how could anyone possibly make a movie this bad. A lot of what makes this movie bad is the performances of Mark Wahlberg and almost all the other actors.

 As much as you could say this isn't at the fault of M Night I think a lot of it is for the way he made Mark act in this role. In an interview he talked about how he had to put a lot of effort into making sure he played the role like he did instead of his normal macho persona. Along with the acting for  this movie being bad the script and plot are almost worse. There is literally a 30 second scene of Mark Wahlbergs character talks to a plastic tree. 

This movie does have some traces of M Nights previous stylistic choices. Many of the conversations have the same tone as one's in The Sixth Sense or Signs but the content and acting in them ruins them. This movie actually has pretty weak cinematography. M Night's films are usually very well shot and use interesting angles to show what is going on in the scene. A good example of this is in the  Sixth Sense when Bruce Willis looks at his wife  through  the  mirror in the bathroom. It allows him to observe her without her seeing him but still allowing the audience to see her. However, The Happening is pretty much devoid of  shots like this. Nothing about this movie stands out as good at all. Not the story, acting, cinematography, sound, or even lighting stand out as a saving grace for this  movie. I've heard theories that this movie is a parody on the genre and not meant to be taken seriously but, if you watch interview footage about this movie M Night seems to defend the movie and even get angry when people criticize it. 

After making this movie M Night went on to make Avatar: The last Air bender the movie and After earth, both of which were terrible. It seems that the days of M Night making great films is over. All we can do about it is appreciate the great films he has made and pretend the other one's simply didn't happen.