M. Night Shyamalan went from being one of the hottest filmmakers people were watching in 2000. Yet by 2010, he was mostly a joke thanks in part to a gag on Robot Chicken where he is is parodying with the catchphrase, “What a twist!”
Yet some filmmakers have hits and misses. It happens to everyone including Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese and Orson Welles. Yet, there seems to be prejudice surrounding Shyamalan. I liked The Village even though many people didn’t. And Lady in Water has its fans who say it was poorly marketed. Split was great but we expected more out of Glass.
In The Watchers, it’s his daughter, Ishana Night Shyamalan, who finds herself in trouble. Yet her father is credited as one of the producers. There’s also a question of how prepared she is to handle a movie like this on her first outing, especially if she’s only worked as a second-unit director on her father’s movies. The problem is this is a movie where there is a twist but it really doesn’t matter.
By the final act, most people would’ve have stopped watching this movie halfway through. Shyamalan does a good job at showing an eerie mood. Mina (Dakota Fanning) works at a petshop in Galway, Ireland where she is asked to deliver a golden conure parrot to a location in Belfast. Her car breaks down in the middle of a forest where strange events have been happening.
She finds safety in a coup building nearby where an older woman, Madeline (Olwen Ferere), is living with some younger people, Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) and Ciara (Georgina Campbell). There’s also a huge two way mirror on one side. Mina is told there are Watchers out in the woods who are shapeshifting fairies that are observing humans so they can be like them.
Anytime, you hear there are shapeshifting beings in any horror or fantasy movie, you immediately begin to wonder if that includes one of the characters we’ve already been introduced to. And that’s the problem. Shyamalan could be working with a great premise of four strangers who don’t really know each other, so it could it be possible one or more of them might be a Watcher fooling the others. Devil, which the elder Shyamalan co-wrote and co-produced, had this premise of people stuck in an elevator under the fear one of them is an evil entity.
Nope, instead, we get the same story of people running from CGI and discovering something that will just lead us to get to the twist a littl longer because the movie wouldn’t last as long to be a feature. I was very bored by this movie that even when it pulled up the twist we all knew was coming, it still has to resort to same cliched tropes.
The movie is adapted from a novel of the same name by A.M. Shine. So, it’s totally Shyamalan’s fault. This is a boring story regardless.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 