Was Glass as Terrible as Everyone Said?
Glass. Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.
M. Night Shyamalan has had a most interesting career. After a couple of true-blue masterworks, he then suicided his career by making movies that were objectively quite terrible and then, after the success of Split, everyone decided to let him out of Hollywood Jail so he could complete his Unbreakable trilogy with the film Glass, which people have generally hated.
The question, then, is what the hell is up with M. Night? Is he a visionary? Or does he suck? Look no further reader, we have the answers that you seek!
Glass cannot be understood without placing it next to Unbreakable for comparison. Unbreakable, it must be remembered, was released in 2000 before the super hero film was a tried and tested genre convention. And it is very much, by design, unlike other super hero movies. For one, the structure of the plot is held hostage by Shyamalan’s love of twist endings which in 2000 was still in full swing having not yet been thoroughly flogged to death and transmuted into box office poison. But he also very consciously tried to make a realistic super hero film, one that was kind of boring and plodding and almost workmanlike. What would a super hero’s origin story be like in real life if he was, say, just a kind of average guy? That was what Shyamalan wanted to explore in Unbreakable, undermining and toying with genre conventions as he went.
And by the Grace of God, when given the chance to complete the trilogy, he went right back to that original vision. In making Glass, he made the movie that he wanted to make, audience and critic expectations be damned! I respect him for sticking to his guns and making a film that is stubbornly non-conformist. You may not like what he did with Glass, but it took guts - especially given all the bombs he has launched into theaters over the last 15 years - to stick with his plainly somewhat strange vision come hell or high water.
I honestly cannot really decide if I like or dislike the film. I certainly dislike certain elements, like the decision to try and introduce an element of suspense by trying to convince us that actually these guys do not possess super-human powers. Like, we already know that they do. The movie wastes entirely too much of its precious capital trying to make us doubt that, just so it can set up some rather lame reveals on the back-end. But there is always the added element when watching an M. Night film of trying to figure out what kind of twist he might be trying to introduce. It becomes a kind of guessing game, but because he has made so many shit films lately, it’s not the fun kind of guessing game. You are always left wondering - is this unexplainable plot point or character action by design to mislead us, or is it simply bad writing? You just never really know if the baffling parts are by design, unintentional or some combination.
Just like Unbreakable, the style and tone of Glass is fairly reserved - it’s meant to be grounded in reality, to achieve a certain facade of verisimilitude. That I was fine with, and the acting is freakin great. But at a certain point you realize M. Night is trying too hard to call attention to how different and subversive his film is. The exact point at which that happens will vary from person to person, but for me it was when Samuel L. Jackson shouted something along the lines of “Aha, a classic heel turn!” Like, what are you the fucking Narrator?
If you have confidence in what you are doing, then just do it. But Glass begins to veer pretty far into Telling, Not Showing territory which paradoxically undermines what it is trying to do. The ending is pretty riskily anti-climactic, having our hero drown like a chump in a little pool of water during what would normally be a spectacular CGI-laden showdown in which the good guy triumphs. Again, I like the idea of what he did. It was risky, and different and clearly subverts the genre conventions. It’s just the execution ends up letting the ideas down, and that is a shame.
So, is M. Night a visionary or does he suck? I think, like many great minds, it’s a little bit of both. He does sometimes have some pretty good, even great, ideas. And sometimes this ideas are executed almost flawlessly, as in The Sixth Sense. Sometimes the execution doesn’t live up to the vision, which I think is the case with Glass. And other times, neither the vision nor the execution have any place in modern society. That M. Night has throughout his career moved fluently through all of these stages is ultimately what makes him such a puzzling and kind of frustrating filmmaker.
