What must M. Night do to get some respect around here? Make a movie about a bored, broken family that experiences some emotional trauma? Pen a screenplay that follows some poorly adapted story about ancient Rome? I'm sick of character melodramas and sweeping, historical epics. I want to see some science fiction done right. Not ""Sunshine"" starring creepy guy from ""Red Eye."" Not even ""The Day after Tomorrow."" But stories told by people willing to question the nature of our world. Questions such as, what would you do if you found out that we are not alone in the universe? How are our lives changed by things we cannot explain?
In the vein of H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, these are the questions that writer and director M. Night Shyamalan is not afraid to ask... and he gets shat on for it. Everybody's so excited to judge his endings that they miss the actual points of his movies.
Hence, people are mislead by the reviews they read. Bad reviews create a bad buzz, and buzzes are what determine who goes to see what and when. Once it gets out that the critics have it in for M. Night, a buzz accumulates, and after a while, people get wary.
His highest grossing film is ""The Sixth Sense,"" raking in $293,501,675. After that the numbers drop with dismal consistency. ""Signs"" saw a lower, but credible, turn-out. ""The Village"" did worse still, but okay, due to months of high profile, expensive hype-building. By then, M. Night had already become a laughing stock in the media parade of critics and pretension. So, once we finally get to ""Lady in the Water,"" we're talking a gross of about $40 million—tops.
That in mind, in ""Lady in the Water,"" M. Night takes deliberate jabs at unfriendly critics. He gives a dreary fate to a sad little character who assumes he knows everything about the construction of plot. His heroes (as usual) are everyday people: landlords, struggling writers and kids. He comments directly on the construction of a story while building on the wakes of primal, human fears: darkness, imprisonment and, of course, water. While it experiences moments of flawed comic timing, ""Lady in the Water"" is, essentially, the smartest tale in the M. Night storybook.
You may beg to differ, but you have to ask yourself: Did I dislike the movie because I walked out unstimulated, bored? Or did I dislike the movie because the critics asked me to dislike it days, weeks, even months ahead of time? We can construct our opinion on a movie well before we enter the theater. It's the product of the M. Night buzz and it affects many other movies aside from those of the master himself.
When it comes down to it, critics need to remember the audience and make judgments based on a purely relative, unbiased scale. Not all movies can be as good as ""Chocolat"" or ""The Godfather,"" and that we must be willing to accept. If we don't have a wide, diverse audience in mind, then what good is our existence? The point is to be opinionated, well-versed and open, not highfalutin SOBs with an agenda. And at that, I end my beloved trilogy. I don't know how exciting it was for you, but for me, it was like ""Star Wars""—but only episodes 4, 5 and 6. I know. I was just nonchalantly critical, but who can disagree?
