After Earth: M. Night Shyamalan

Sony Pictures has announced that one of their big summer offerings, After Earth is moving up a week from June 7th to May 31st.  The news is incidental and may not mean too much.  After all, the futuristic father/son science fiction flick stars Will Smith in his preferred genre alongside his son Jaden, and dates switching is all apart of the tentpole game.  If nothing else it gives the original film, co-written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, another weekend to breathe before Man of Steel presumably takes the world by storm.  What is fascinating is that nearly all of the marketing material is cleverly trying to disguise the fact that Shyamalan is directing this.  Surely, with Will Smith's marquee name and mug, there would be little question that he wouldn't be front and center, but the fall from grace from the Hollywood echelon for Shyamalan is interesting to the point that while critics and fans have continued to throw stones upon his career and not quite living up to the potential he first brought, he is still one of the few filmmakers allowed into the big budget Hollywood circle and continue making pricey films.  Perhaps this is because, despite (or in spite) of the drubbing his films consistently bring, they still make lots of money:

• The Last Airbender (2010)- $319.7 million
• The Happening (2008)- $163.4 million
• The Lady in the Water (2006)- $72.7 million
• The Village (2004)- $256.6 million
• Signs (2002)- $408.2 million
• Unbreakable (2000)- $248.1 million
• The Sixth Sense (1999)- $672.8 million

All figures are worldwide box office totals, which skews the picture slightly and puts more vetted interest in international receipts and their ultimate power on Hollywood product.  In this light, ever one of Shyamalan's films have made their money back-- I'm dismissing his first feature, the 1992 dramedy Wide Awake because it has nil to to with the Shyamalan brand.

Yet it's still a fascination that the man once deemed heir to the Spielberg throne fell so hard and so fast in the cinematic conversation.  Naturally, starting things off with a lightening in a bottle success story like The Sixth Sense would never be an easy act to follow for that film was so huge and so beloved in such a short period of time-- it was one of those genuine once-every-few-years surprise stories that seems to galvanize the culture and jolt it.  Looking back, the film still holds up as a lithe and suspenseful ghost story.  The film earned six Oscar nominations, including two for Shyamalan-- anything that followed would be hard to match.  Some take great offense to Unbreakable, his quickie follow-up which also featured Bruce Willis.  I find it the best film of his career, a corker of originality, suspense and everything in the air finesse-- it's the tightest and most economical film he's made, and showcases sequences worthy of the coined moniker, Hitchcockian, however, in some finicky circles, he was already beginning to lose some of his luster.  In full confession, the twist of The Sixth Sense was ruined for me before I saw the film shortly after it arrived, and that luster hadn't really materialized for me the first go around.

Signs was a big honking success, and was a nice showcase for the directors ability to distill good, natural performances in hooky, Twilight Zone-ish environments, but for the first time (at least for me), it felt like a cheap, gotcha at the audience.  The Village continued that trend but brought it to a more insipid level, despite being beautifully photographed.  Even still, however, Shyamalan seemed a game showman and certain sequences of both films have a flowing magnetism that deserved a better script and richer characters.  There was a sort of rooting interest in them in spite of themselves.  The latter product (The Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender) almost feel read like stern middle fingers to Shymalan's detractors.  And yet, the filmmaker seems to in a sense be eating his cake and having it to-- for he's in a metaphoric movie land jail for delivering years of crap product and barely whispered during the marketing of his latest film, but still enjoying the autonomy of making big budget studio films with movie stars and producing films that are turning a profit.

The Last Airbender

What can one say about M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender that hasn't already been said, as evident by it pathetic 8% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  Well, for one thing, it's ghastly the film made nearly $70 million over the Fourth of July weekend, no doubt inflated by it's 3-D surcharges.  That the story, an adaptation of the popular cartoon, Avatar: The Last Airbender, is an utter dud-- not just disappointing, but boring, full of needless exposition and desperate for franchising, therefore embodying the very worst of contemporary big-budget Hollywood films.  What else-- oh the acting is fairly atrocious; with all the protest and negative criticism regarding the casting of white actors in non-white roles, it seems almost a service to those outraged that the film is an utter flop and the lily white stars are quite disposable.  And for a film that reportedly cost $150 million to make, why does it look so crappy?  It's not just the last-minute 3-D hack job that's tacky, it's the whole production.  When I took those silly glasses off, all I saw was cheap, phony CG effects, and when I put them back on it was just the same crappy effects darkened.

I'm quite relieved that I didn't pay for this film, but I felt nothing but sympathy for those who had, because how could one not feel ripped off by this joyless, excruciating exercise.  The point is after the fiascoes of The Village, Lady in the Water and The Happening, how on earth is Shyamalan willing to get a major studio (in this case Paramount) to shell out buckets of money on a big summer tentpole release?  How after a track record of every picture of his being exponentially worse than  it's predecessors is this man still welcomed to the club.  It gets richer, The Last Airbender is his biggest film to date in scale and budget, it's really his first attempt at working with effects and yet Paramount Pictures is willing to dump a potentially lucrative franchise into this man's arms.  I don't get that logic-- if a studio wanted to waste hundreds of millions of dollars, I'll glad take some of it off their hands.

And yet, perhaps Paramount isn't solely to blame.  I personally almost hate to admit this, but I've seen of Shyamalan's films (even the silly indie Wide Awake he made shortly before The Sixth Sense catapulted him into this entity that would eventually turn evil.)  And the truth of the matter is that The Last Airbender is the first film he's ever made without any redeeming qualities-- it's a disaster on nearly every level; one hopes that Mystery Science Theater 3000 is revived just to make something entertaining here.  For the thing is that before I believed Mr. Shyamalan, thoroughout all the wrong-headed choices, and reported ego issues, had bonafide talent as a filmmaker (not as a writer), but there's a style to him that has kept even his worst films slightly afloat because he seemed a controlled filmmaker of mood and pacing.  Even in the dreadful The Happening, visually the films looks eerie and kinda cool in certain shots-- the movie is awful is nearly ever other way, but there was something small to hold onto, something to grasp that there might be a shred of unwasted potential in Shyamalan.

But in Airbender, there's nothing-- crappy looking fakery, a bloated self-serious story, small and very mannered performances, and zero sense of pace, mood or control.  The story centers around a boy named Ang, who is the Avatar, or the One, or whatever, he's a little boy with great power and responsibility.  He has to save the world, or second rate middle-earth replica of the world by keeping the peace between the fire and water regions, or whatever.  The fire people are evil, and there's been a great war for a century, but the little boy must save all.  I hear the cartoon is actually fairly decent, but one wouldn't easily get the sense from the film, with its neediness to simplify every aspect and explain everything at least four times.  Seriously there was about six points in the movie where I thought, "I know, move on," but the movie didn't listen.

Of course thankfully the movie does invite the opportunity for a sequel.  I feel like a broken record, but Hollywood, when one is watching a movie and throwing a zillion dollars at it, perhaps it would be in the best interest of all involved to worry about said single movie and focus on franchises later.  For the money this film inexplicably made, a question lingers-- does anyone like it?  I watched this film with friends of mine, who love this kind of stuff (I admittedly don't), and they didn't like it either-- something to mull over, before part two is put into production.

One more note-- if one does desire two hours of exterminating your brain cells, don't bother with seeing it in 3-D.  The only luzury is the three to five dollars more the studio will profit.  I noticed two sequences in 3-D in my experience-- the Paramount logo (easily the best part of the movie), and the end credits.  Everything else looked flat and dark and sad.  I have nothing against artists toying around with the medium, but let's keep it at that from now on....please.  F