M. Night Shyamalan’s new film The Last Airbender arrives this week, and we’re celebrating the release of his ninth feature with a feature dedicated to him and his film. Ever since he first came to prominence in 1999 when The Sixth Sense became a worldwide box-office smash the films he both writes and directs have been synonymous with the twist ending. Although he’s tried to distance himself from pulling the rug from under the audience in recent years, there’s no doubt that his back catalogue contains some pretty memorable endings. So here is an extremely spoilerific guide to the twists of the the films of Manoj Nelliyatu Shyamalan.
1) Bruce Willis is a Ghost
If this is news to you, then you’ve probably been living in an underground bunker sealed off from the rest of the world for the last ten years…but in The Sixth Sense, Bruce Willis’ child psychologist Malcolm Crowe is actually killed in the first scene of the film. From then on in, it’s Crowe’s ghost who appears to nine year-old Haley Joel Osmont’s character Cole, a child who sees dead people. It’s probably one of the greatest twists in modern cinema, but one that also ensures the film loses the majority of its impact on repeat viewings. Still, it earned Shyamalan an impressive six Oscar nominations and carved out a distinctive niche for the Indian-American director.
2) Samuel L. Jackson is the Villain to Bruce Willis’ Hero
The highly anticipated follow-up to The Sixth Sense was effectively Shyamalan’s comic book movie, with Quentin Tarantino describing it as a “brilliant retelling of the Superman mythology.” Bruce Willis’ ‘unbreakable’ man is alerted to his super-human powers by Sam Jackson’s Elijah ‘Mr Glass’ Price after emerging as the sole survivor of a train crash, completely unharmed. The twist this time comes as Mr Glass reveals that he was responsible for the train crash and a number of other fatal disasters, as he searched for the polar opposite/hero to his frail character/villain. Unfortunately this time around, the twist (and the expectation of a twist) was what let the director down from what was otherwise a largely engaging picture.
3) “Tell Merrill to Swing Away”
Signs was released back when Mel Gibson was still considered sane and Shyamalan still made half-decent movies. It saw the director foray further into the supernatural through an alien invasion movie and although there’s much less of a twist this time around, it still revolves around a highly revelatory ending. We’re made aware of the invaders’ weakness to water (just like Willis in Unbreakable) and reveals that the dying words of the words of the wife of Mel Gibson’s priest contained the foresight to save his and his family’s lives. In this writer’s humble opinion, Signs is probably Shyamalan’s finest picture, and is at the very least is the most satisfying as a complete experience. Unfortunately, it’s probably also his last good movie…it’s all been downhill from here.
4) It’s Set In The Present
Accusations of plagiarism set aside, this is probably one of the worst twists you’re ever likely to see at the cinema. While the film’s early premise that there are monsters in the wood is revealed to be false in the second act, the fact that the assumed to be 19th Century village is actually hidden inside a nature reserve during the present day. It’s not that the twist is expected, it’s just that you just don’t care. It’s so basic, so utterly inane that the level of disappointment garnered by such an anticlimax renders the preceding film a complete waste of time. In fact, it seems that this was the final straw for Shyamalan as far as twists go. In an attempt to shrug off his ‘one trick pony’ tag he went on to make a pair of cinematic masterpieces: The Lady in the Water and The Happening.
