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+--- Thread: M Night Shamalamadingdingdong's steady descent into madness... (/showthread.php?tid=5838)
M Night Shamalamadingdingdong's steady descent into madness... - Dark Jaguar - 8th July 2010
I've reached the point where I consider ol' Missingname there a one-hit wonder.
Well, I enjoyed The Sixth Sense. It was a good movie where the mood fit the basic premise pretty well. The big reveal was also well done (though I ruined it by having watched too much Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits when I was younger), and even if you knew the ending going in, it was still well done. Yes he had some movies before this, but nobody cares.
Unbreakable tried to pick up on that, and again I have to say the story was pretty well told. I thought the ending was extremely lame, but I consider it a good movie in spite of that, if not as good as his first.
His next big thing is Signs. Here's where a lot of people started seeing problems with him not thinking some of his endings through. While it was still pretty good in some ways, and the idea of looking at one of these things from the perspective of just some random family that isn't "the great group of heroes" does have merit, there's just so much overdone drama that, in retrospect, really is kinda dumb. There's that whole prolonged bit about cutting off one of the alien's hands, which aside from being way too overdone, really called into question JUST how effective these great alien invaders actually were. They travel a billion light years only to be stopped by doors? Really? They have NOTHING at all? Random wild beasts could kill them. Really, it's so lame. The ending is the lamest of all, finding out water, WATER, can kill them. Yes, you have War of the Worlds with some bacteria the aliens never adapted to wiping them out, but at least that's a bit more understandable. These aliens never noticed the planet they wanted to invade was 70% HORRIBLE MELTING ACID, and that this substance that MELTED them sometimes FELL FROM THE SKY? It would be like us deciding to invade Venus! How stupid and incompetent are these aliens? Yes at a certain point you have to suspend your disbelief, but this movie was an M Night movie, he wanted to make it believable, he wants to make stuff that's (supposedly) realistic with people reacting to strange situations in realistic ways. However, during all of his character writing not once did he ever stop to think about the alien's personalities, and perhaps thinking that not a single person in the audience is going to buy aliens who MELT IN WATER invading Earth? I make a big deal even though it only really comes up at the end, but really the behavior of the aliens the entire movie is completely incomprehensible, and not in the "beyond our understanding" way, but in the "that is completely idiotic" way. Again, there's a lot to like about it, but stupid aliens end up ruining it. They'd probably have done equally well using the aliens from Mars Attacks.
From there the guy releases this steady stream of progressively worse "twist ending" movies. With The Village it started getting dumb, to the point where the moment I saw the preview I already made a prediction on the ending. I based that on already seeing that exact storyline ON AN EPISODE OF THE JOHNNY QUEST CARTOON. They advertised a big secret behind the main threat in this (their emphasis) "Isolated town
", and it was just SO obvious. For those who didn't figure it out instantly, it's not worth even putting in a spoiler tag, the town is actually a lost town literally just a couple of miles or so from modern civilization, and the "monsters" they hear are just passing traffic from a nearby road. The sad thing is, the reveal at the end was far lamer than I could have imagined. I at least tried to give it the credit of thinking maybe someone FROM modern society gets lost and ends up here, and has to spend some time convincing everyone their flashlight isn't witchcraft, but no, it's just a reveal of the highway, a truck, and then credits roll. It's so lame, and again the whole town is full of depressing sad people. The Johnny Quest cartoon episode I saw did a better job than this movie. At least that had a bigger breadth of human emotion to draw from than "depressing gritty depression".
With Lady in the Water I started to pick up on the fact that the ONLY personality and social interactions this guy can write are dour serious depressing things. It worked in Sixth Sense best, but with each new movie it seems that's the only note the guy can sing. It's not "realistic" at this point, it's just boring. Human behavior and emotion is a little WIDER than the net he casts in all these movies, and Lady in the Water, while it DOES have some good reason to be depressing, ALSO has a bigger group of characters, and at least some of them should be a little more easy going than that, but here it really starts to strike me just how depressing such a wide group of characters ALL are, ALL the time, the entire movie, and while some have good reason, a lot don't really have that except for the sake of some lesson about how life is pain or something. At least a story about telling a story is somewhat interesting, if not as original as the weird fans like to claim it is.
The Happening, as far as I can tell, is M's way of saying "I can do endings other than trick endings". The moment I saw the previews, which consisted of explaining the horrors of how people are starting to randomly and inexplicably commit suicide and how everyone's starting to panic about it, I predicted what sort of twist and moral it might have. I was wrong, way wrong. However, that's only because the "reveal" (not a twist this time) was just so... so... lame. The reason everyone is dying is due to some weird pollen plants are releasing that's causing people to kill themselves, carried on the wind. That's it. The rest of the movie is the main characters running from... wind. It's all so stupid. At some point the characters wonder if this is evolution/nature's way of eliminating "the greatest threat to life on Earth", which basically means they fail biology forever, completely misunderstanding evolution, and nature, and all that stuff. There's no basis for it, no plant communication, it's literally explained as just a weird genetic fluke. Gaia doesn't appear, there's no concentrated war like in Avatar with animals running amok. Just some people doing bad philosophy, and it's lame. It is one thing to give a message about protecting the environment, it's another to do something this ignorant of how nature actually works and pass it off as profound when it's actually just the dumbest sort of hippy nonsense. The worst thing? The worst thing is the twist I expected would have made for a MUCH better movie. In my version, the twist is that the main "cause" is actually mass panic. Everyone is committing suicide in waves because everyone is terrified of whatever's causing people to commit suicide, and people one by one either try to kill themselves before it "hits" them or just give up and give into their fear. It would be a message about not getting caught up in mass hysteria, that sort of thing. I thought THAT was what the movie would be, and while I still didn't really want to see it, as I thought that twist was "obvious and a little played out", it STILL would have made for a far more interesting and entertaining movie than what we actually got.
Now there's this Last Airbender thing. Never even heard of the series it was based on until the previews for the movie came along. It's apparently some anime. I have yet to see it, but I don't want to now. Everyone, and i mean everyone, hates it. Professional critics, casual reviewers, fans of the show, people who've never seen the show, and even little kids all seem to be saying it's a terrible movie. What little I can get about it is so much story is removed that a lot of stuff doesn't make any sense (kinda like the really poor movie version of Golden Compass a few years back), and that others finally noticed what I did a while ago, that Night can only do sad and serious characters. Apparently there's barely any humor or "fun" in this KID'S MOVIE because M. Night can't imagine anyone still being able to, um, enjoy life, in a war situation. Heck life still goes on man. Learn about other emotions! Love can exist even on a battlefield after all (there's a number of historical accounts of this sort of thing, just because you can't imagine it doesn't mean it can't happen, it just means you don't understand humans as well as you like to think you do). You can call me Pollyanna say I'm crazy as a loon, I believe that emotions like happiness aren't frickin' lies disguising "deep depression, the only real emotion in the universe".
And so it's been. M. Night had ONE excellent movie, a couple that had some good moments, and it's gotten worse and worse at such a pace that I think the next thing he makes will make Manos: Hand of Fate look like Schindler's List.
M Night Shamalamadingdingdong's steady descent into madness... - Weltall - 8th July 2010
I predicted The Sixth Sense about 200 seconds into it.
That was the only movie of his that I saw and didn't think was utter horse shit.
M Night Shamalamadingdingdong's steady descent into madness... - Dark Jaguar - 9th July 2010
I think we're on the same page here. I tried giving his next few more credit than you, but that's about it, and really I could go into more detail on how lame I think Unbreakable's ending is (kinda ruined the established tone of the entire movie right there). In the end he's still just trying desperately to get that Sixth Sense fame back, but he's lost whatever he ever had.
M Night Shamalamadingdingdong's steady descent into madness... - Darunia - 9th July 2010
I've never seen any film by him.
M Night Shamalamadingdingdong's steady descent into madness... - Dark Jaguar - 9th July 2010
Oh I forgot this. In Lady in the Water, he did something really childish. He created a caricature of one of his critics and then killed that guy off. Look pal, if you have something to say to a critic, feel free to say it, but leave it out of your movies okay? Not only will most of your audience not really get it, but those who do will just see it as you whining instead of getting on with the movie.
M Night Shamalamadingdingdong's steady descent into madness... - Great Rumbler - 9th July 2010
While it is not perhaps as offensively bad as The Happening was, The Last Airbender nevertheless is absurdly boring. So many things happen that don't really make much sense, there are tons of characters that I care nothing about because none of them have been properly developed, and there's absolutely no connection between the scores of scenes that litter the film like casually discarded orphans. The dialog is unbearable and aided by stiff, awkward acting. The final battle at the end is the most putrid excuse for a battle scene in the history of film, it must be seen to be believed. The plot is riddled with holes and the plot that does make sense is spoon-fed through carefully staged bouts of exposition that are repeated ad naseum. The art of bending itself is completed retarded in the live-action realm, it just looks idiotic and laughable whenever a battle strikes up and people bend against each other.
This is one of the worst movies I've ever seen in theaters.
M Night Shamalamadingdingdong's steady descent into madness... - Weltall - 9th July 2010
The Happening was almost certainly one of the worst movies I ever saw in a movie theater.
I think only Twilight comes even close to that level of absolute creative void.
M Night Shamalamadingdingdong's steady descent into madness... - A Black Falcon - 9th July 2010
I haven't seen any of his movies either. I don't exactly watch horror movies often.
M Night Shamalamadingdingdong's steady descent into madness... - Great Rumbler - 9th July 2010
Only two of his movies [The Village and Signs] could really be called horror movies.
M Night Shamalamadingdingdong's steady descent into madness... - Sacred Jellybean - 9th July 2010
Why wouldn't you call the Sixth Sense a horror movie? Or the Happening? Unbreakable isn't horror, though, so I'll give you that one. I haven't seen Lady in the Water, but it's probably close (suspense?).
I've only seen snippets of it, but from what I read about Lady in the Water, M. Night writes and casts himself as a writer whose job it is to save all of humanity, which sounds too god damned hilarious. The fact that he also wrote in a critic and killed him off is even funnier. I really need to catch up on this guy. I'm sure his movies are a lot better if you go in prepared to laugh rather than to be scared, or somber, or tense, or whatever.
I'll say this, though, he's at least shown some directional capability. Signs suffered from a stupid ending, but the scene where Mel Gibson and his family are boarded up in their house, fighting amongst each other while simultaneously scared shitless, is some amazing tension and drama. It was worth watching for that at least.
People were speculating that The Last Airbender might be good because he would be directing someone else's script, rather than putting to screen something he himself wrote. 'Guess it didn't help, though.
M Night Shamalamadingdingdong's steady descent into madness... - Great Rumbler - 10th July 2010
Wouldn't the Sixth Sense just be more of a creepy thriller than a horror movie? And The Happening is a comedy.
Quote:People were speculating that The Last Airbender might be good because he would be directing someone else's script, rather than putting to screen something he himself wrote. 'Guess it didn't help, though.
Shyamalan wrote his own The Last Airbender script.
M Night Shamalamadingdingdong's steady descent into madness... - Sacred Jellybean - 10th July 2010
Yeah, I guess it depends on how you define horror. There are dead people walking around and moments of gore, so you could probably categorize it that way.
Quote:Shyamalan wrote his own The Last Airbender script.
Welp