Fair warning, any time I'm discussing a book or movie there will probably be some spoilers. Just assume any post you click on ruins everything. Including your opinion of me.
The folks over at Kendall Reviews were cool enough to let me come on and pontificate about why I write the stuff I write. This was a hell of a lot of fun, and I think it turned out to be a pretty interesting look at my influences and how I got to where I am.
Also, there’s a Napster reference in there. Check it out here:
That’s right, now YOU can see my #1-ranked movie of 2019. Here’s what I had to say about the Splits in my “Top Movies of 2019” countdown (half-way through the year addition):
1. The Banana Splits
Pure. Fucking. Joy. Taking the Banana Splits and making a legit horror movie is tough to pull off, and yet Danishka Esterhazy absolutely rose to the challenge. The jokes land, the gore is on point, the child actors aren’t annoying and the adult actors nail the shit out of their roles. Perhaps it’s not high art, but it’s a perfect example of a well-crafted, batshit-insane horror flick. The care and attention to detail is evident throughout (ex. and SPOILER the way one Split is taken out mirrors their first kill almost exactly). It’s a shame this movie is consigned to VOD/Blu-ray, because it’s the perfect flick to tie one on with your friends and go see on the big screen. Hoping it hits the midnight movie circuit one of these days. Goddamn incredible and I can’t see anything topping it this year.
I’m looking forward to revisiting this bad boy later this month when it drops on Blu-Ray. And then again, and again, and again, every year, for the rest of my life. BANANA SPLITS FTW!
Seriously, go watch it.
I originally posted my top ten films up through July last week, but as fate would have it no sooner had I posted that list than a couple amazing films came into my life. I started off updating the previous post, but there’s been some major shakeups (and yeah, I’m aware of recency bias) so I decided to take a mulligan and just create a new list.
Gone are BRIGHTBURN and MEGA TIME SQUAD, now slotting in at 12 and 11 respectively. Originally they’d ranked higher than THE HEAD HUNTER, but since the latter was made on such a shoestring budget I decided to leave it on.
10. The Head Hunter
Controlling for budget, this might be in my top three. Made for a mere $30,000, the movie does a hell of a lot with what it has, and is consistently moving and compelling. Christopher Rygh does amazing work in a nearly-silent role. The set design is beautiful, and some of the devices used (the horns summoning Rygh’s monster hunter, for example) are pretty neat, working well to create anticipation and dread. Unfortunately a movie about a guy who fights monsters needs some actually monster-fighting, and the micro-budget forced them to show only the before and after of the battles. Give these guys a few more bucks and I bet they’ll do something really fucking cool.
9. Ma
Earlier I mentioned movies that punch way above their weight class, and Ma is the first of them. I saw the trailer in front of probably three or four movies and immediately wrote it off, but after hearing some good word-of-mouth I decided to check it out for myself. WOW. The trailer didn’t do the movie justice (it did spoil a really fucking awesome scene, though). Ma’s less a horror movie than a meditation on disconnection and loneliness. By the end I was so emotionally invested in all of the characters, I just wanted everyone to work shit out and get along.
8. Child’s Play
One more movie I was primed to hate but end up enjoying quite a bit. Just like everyone else on the internet, I wasn’t looking forward to a Child’s Play remake. At least until I saw the Wondercon panel. I’ll probably do my definitive Child’s Play rankings at some point and believe it or not the remake slots in around number three. The movie plays a whole lot like the 1990 classic Hardware, complete with sweaty, pervy neighbor, and they’ve solved the jackass internet tough guy objection to Chucky (“Dude, I’d just like punt that fucker out the window”) in a creative way that makes the franchise relevant AND scary.
Plus, the fucking bear. Oh my god I want a spin-off.
7. Avengers: Endgame
I don’t think I have anything fascinating to say about this movie. It’s an Avengers movie, it did everything it was supposed to do and kicked ass and tugged heart strings and brought the first ten years of the MCU to a respectable conclusion. Good stuff.
6. Midsommar
Ari Aster is the greatest music video director of all time. The guy knows how to craft a compelling visual, that’s for sure, and the music is top-notch. Despite the legion of dipshits in my theater that laughed at literally everything, I found the movie to be almost unbearably tense (in a good way), disturbing, and consistently fascinating. Narratively there’s almost nothing going on, and if you’ve ever seen a pagan cult movie there are zero surprises. Every character that’s not Florence Pugh or her boyfriend feels like an NPC, and maybe that’s by design, but I can’t get behind that approach. The execution is brilliant but expected—while it’s a sterling example of what it is, I’ve seen this movie before. For a new twist on the pagan cult movie, check out Gareth Evans’ Apostle. I’m not saying that’s a better movie than Midsommar, but narratively I found it the superior movie of the two.
5. Velvet Buzzsaw
Nightcrawler is one of my favorite movies EVER, and getting the band back together was a fantastic idea. I had a hell of a lot of fun with this movie. Incredibly compelling, I never felt the urge to check my phone which is my measuring stick for how good a movie on NetFlix is (regardless of how bored I am in a theater, I’m not pulling out my fucking phone like an asshole). If the movie had just been about pretentious art douchebags trying to out-douche each other over Henry Darger’s Gold, I would have liked the movie even more. The supernatural horror element felt tacked on and unnecessary, and this movie is the ultimate example of an all-time great title having fuck-all to do with the story. Still, I loved the hell out of this thing despite its flaws.
4. Under the Silver Lake
Speaking of flawed movies! USL was a fun, captivating joy ride through hipster Hollywood (both past and present). Yes, Andrew Garfield is kind of a mopecore asshole creep and no, I wouldn’t want to be friends with him, but I also don’t need a likeable protag to enjoy a movie. Not all of the elements come together in a satisfying way in the end, but the individual scenes are well-executed and some deliriously-haunting imagery has stuck with me the past week. The scene with the Songwriter is truly terrifying on an existential level, and the mystery of whether Topher Grace’s unnamed “Bar Buddy” character is actually supposed to BE Topher Grace still has me intrigued. If you go into this movie with expectations, you're probably going to hate it, but if you let the movie do it’s thing it’s a wild bit of what-the-fuck.
3. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood
There’s fifty-six years of movie-loving and movie-making in every last frame of this thing. I can see this sliding up in my rankings over the next couple months for sure. Full disclosure, I just watched this last night but the movie’s managed to grow on me even more in those few hours. Part love letter to a bygone area of cinema, part bold challenge to anyone working in the true crime genre, OUTH asks and answers some pretty interesting questions while simultaneously telling a couple small, touching, human stories. After watching this I half-suspect QT hasn’t actually been making movies for the past twenty-five years; he’s been weaving a spell on a global scale, and when his tenth film is finished the circle will be complete and we’ll all be sucked into a new reality.
2. Knife+Heart
A contemporary, ‘70s-set take on the giallo. Moreso than last year’s Suspiria, I thought Knife perfectly nailed the atmosphere and look of the ‘70s. Everybody looks kind of sweaty and gross. I found myself forgetting all the characters were speaking French because I was so invested in the story. Anne Pareze is such a fascinating, morally-questionable creation. Her creation of a pornographic film to both exploit and cope with the tragedy surrounding her is jaw-dropping, both in how some scenes are played for painful laughs but also in what it says about her as a person—insight and indictment in equal measure. Is she trying to make a buck off the deaths of her friends, looking for catharsis in all the wrong places, or a little bit of both? Either way, watch this fucking movie, it’s amazing.
1. The Banana Splits
Pure. Fucking. Joy. Taking the Banana Splits and making a legit horror movie is tough to pull off, and yet Danishka Esterhazy absolutely rose to the challenge. The jokes land, the gore is on point, the child actors aren’t annoying and the adult actors nail the shit out of their roles. Perhaps it’s not high art, but it’s a perfect example of a well-crafted, batshit-insane horror flick. The care and attention to detail is evident throughout (ex. and SPOILER the way one Split is taken out mirrors their first kill almost exactly). It’s a shame this movie is consigned to VOD/Blu-ray, because it’s the perfect flick to tie one on with your friends and go see on the big screen. Hoping it hits the midnight movie circuit one of these days. Goddamn incredible and I can’t see anything topping it this year.
Best Movies That Came Out Last Year That I Didn’t Watch Until This Year: Apostle, Monster Party, Suspiria, Lifechanger.
Man, it’s been a weird year for movies. Some of my most-anticipated flicks ended up being bitter disappointments, while other films that looked terrible punched WELL above their weight. Since we’re halfway(ish) through the year, I thought I’d do a top ten list now, mostly to make my year-end list easier to compile. But it’ll also be fun to see how the list changes in the back half of the year.
Okay, without further ado, let’s do this.
10. The Head Hunter
Controlling for budget, this might be in my top three. Made for a mere $30,000, the movie does a hell of a lot with what it has, and is consistently moving and compelling. Christopher Rygh does amazing work in a nearly-silent role. The set design is beautiful, and some of the devices used (the horns summoning Rygh’s monster hunter, for example) are pretty neat, working well to create anticipation and dread. Unfortunately a movie about a guy who fights monsters needs some actually monster-fighting, and the micro-budget forced them to show only the before and after of the battles. Give these guys a few more bucks and I bet they’ll do something really fucking cool.
9. Brightburn
A bunch of fun kills and some fairly tense scenes, but ultimately the idea of an evil Superman is a whole lot more novel to the average Joe or Sally Popcorn Bucket who hasn’t seen the idea done over and over again in the comics (for my money, Garth Ennis’ Homelander is a way more fun riff on the concept). Not a bad way to spend an hour and a half, but the movie was utterly predictable. I wasn’t surprised once. I think the flick would have been a little more fun with some ambiguity as to whether or not Brandon was the one murdering everyone.
8. Mega Time Squad
There’s only one thing I hate more than time travel, and that’s dream sequences. Mega Time Squad had the deck stacked against it in this respect, but its creators wisely (and unsurprisingly, being responsible for the ass-kickingly hilarious Deathgasm) chose to make a comedy about time travel, which is the one genre where it works for me. If you’re playing time travel straight, it makes my head hurt too much, thinking about all the paradoxes. In a comedy though, especially one where the time travel is conducted via magic, I’m into it. Mega Time Squad is also really Mega Clone Squad, and great fun.
7. Ma
Earlier I mentioned movies that punch way above their weight class, and Ma is the first of them. I saw the trailer in front of probably three or four movies and immediately wrote it off, but after hearing some good word-of-mouth I decided to check it out for myself. WOW. The trailer didn’t do the movie justice (it did spoil a really fucking awesome scene, though). Ma’s less a horror movie than a meditation on disconnection and loneliness. By the end I was so emotionally invested in all of the characters, I just wanted everyone to work shit out and get along.
6. Child’s Play
One more movie I was primed to hate but end up enjoying quite a bit. Just like everyone else on the internet, I wasn’t looking forward to a Child’s Play remake. At least until I saw the Wondercon panel. I’ll probably do my definitive Child’s Play rankings at some point and believe it or not the remake slots in around number three. The movie plays a whole lot like the 1990 classic Hardware, complete with sweaty, pervy neighbor, and they’ve solved the jackass internet tough guy objection to Chucky (“Dude, I’d just like punt that fucker out the window”) in a creative way that makes the franchise relevant AND scary.
Plus, the fucking bear. Oh my god I want a spin-off.
5. Avengers: Endgame
I don’t think I have anything fascinating to say about this movie. It’s an Avengers movie, it did everything it was supposed to do and kicked ass and tugged heart strings and brought the first ten years of the MCU to a respectable conclusion. Good stuff.
4. Midsommar
Ari Aster is the greatest music video director of all time. The guy knows how to craft a compelling visual, that’s for sure, and the music is top-notch. Despite the legion of dipshits in my theater that laughed at literally everything, I found the movie to be almost unbearably tense (in a good way), disturbing, and consistently fascinating. Narratively there’s almost nothing going on, and if you’ve ever seen a pagan cult movie there are zero surprises. Every character that’s not Florence Pugh or her boyfriend feels like an NPC, and maybe that’s by design, but I can’t get behind that approach. The execution is brilliant but expected—while it’s a sterling example of what it is, I’ve seen this movie before. For a new twist on the pagan cult movie, check out Gareth Evans’ Apostle. I’m not saying that’s a better movie than Midsommar, but narratively I found it the superior movie of the two.
3. Velvet Buzzsaw
Nightcrawler is one of my favorite movies EVER, and getting the band back together was a fantastic idea. I had a hell of a lot of fun with this movie. Incredibly compelling, I never felt the urge to check my phone which is my measuring stick for how good a movie on NetFlix is (regardless of how bored I am in a theater, I’m not pulling out my fucking phone like an asshole). If the movie had just been about pretentious art douchebags trying to out-douche each other over Henry Darger’s Gold, I would have liked the movie even more. The supernatural horror element felt tacked on and unnecessary, and this movie is the ultimate example of an all-time great title having fuck-all to do with the story. Still, I loved the hell out of this thing despite its flaws.
2. Knife+Heart
A contemporary, ‘70s-set take on the giallo. Moreso than last year’s Suspiria, I thought Knife perfectly nailed the atmosphere and look of the ‘70s. Everybody looks kind of sweaty and gross. I found myself forgetting all the characters were speaking French because I was so invested in the story. Anne Pareze is such a fascinating, morally-questionable creation. Her creation of a pornographic film to both exploit and cope with the tragedy surrounding her is jaw-dropping, both in how some scenes are played for painful laughs but also in what it says about her as a person—insight and indictment in equal measure. Is she trying to make a buck off the deaths of her friends, looking for catharsis in all the wrong places, or a little bit of both? Either way, watch this fucking movie, it’s amazing.
1. The Banana Splits
Pure. Fucking. Joy. Taking the Banana Splits and making a legit horror movie is tough to pull off, and yet Danishka Esterhazy absolutely rose to the challenge. The jokes land, the gore is on point, the child actors aren’t annoying and the adult actors nail the shit out of their roles. Perhaps it’s not high art, but it’s a perfect example of a well-crafted, batshit-insane horror flick. The care and attention to detail is evident throughout (ex. and SPOILER the way one Split is taken out mirrors their first kill almost exactly). It’s a shame this movie is consigned to VOD/Blu-ray, because it’s the perfect flick to tie one on with your friends and go see on the big screen. Hoping it hits the midnight movie circuit one of these days. Goddamn incredible and I can’t see anything topping it this year.
Best Movies That Came Out Last Year That I Didn’t Watch Until This Year: Apostle, Monster Party, Suspiria.
UPDATE 24-JUL-2019: So of course I post this on the same day I finally get around to watching Under the Silver Lake (that 2.5 hour run time intimidated the fuck out of me) and HOLY SHIT WAS THAT AWESOME. It’s on the list, probably between Child’s Play and Ma. Not a perfect movie by any means, there were a few threads that didn’t quite come together.
One more SPOILER WARNING.
I mostly loved the experience of watching the movie, it’s beautifully and weird and haunting and that one scene of him walking up to the stone house felt like something out of Mandy, BUT there were too many threads that didn’t come together at the end—the pirate guy’s absence being the most minor, but still noted. Mostly I was very disappointed that the grocery store trapdoor didn’t factor in, nor did the Vanna White eye-code. I expected Sarah to use that to signal to Sam that she really wanted him to come get her, for him to use the trap door, and to have some sort of confrontation. The ending of the movie mostly worked for me, just seemed odd those elements didn’t go anywhere.
Got a giveaway going on over on Goodreads, check it out: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/294411?utm_medium=api&utm_source=giveaway_widget
Enter to win one of five free copies of my novella, no purchase necessary (unless you want to buy my novella anyway, that would be rad).
I’ve been lucky enough to appear on a ton of cool podcasts lately while promoting my new novella I’M NOT EVEN SUPPOSED TO BE HERE TODAY, now available in paperback and e-book from Eraserhead Press. Here’s a list, to be updated as more podcasts wise up and realize what a fucking awesome guest I am (and humble, too).
Links below, also available on iTunes, Overcast, and probably a bunch of other apps too.
WHO GOES THERE? Episode 205, “The Wailing”
BIZZONG March 26th, 2019
CASTLE ROCK RADIO Episode 84, “Herman Wouk is Still Alive”
MADNESS HEART RADIO April 12, 2019
Continuing my usual timely coverage of all the latest pop culture behemoths, here’s my thoughts on January 2019’s GLASS.
For movie nerds, horror nerds, and comic book nerds, the film Unbreakable is a monument to the joys of closely-related but sometimes contentious fandoms. Premiering in November 2000, it entered the cultural zeitgeist at a peculiar time. Most comic book fans were still reeling from mid-90s in-theater atrocities like Steel and Batman and Robin as well as at-home assaults on decency like the Generation X and Nick Fury TV movies, while at the same time relishing their first glimmer of hope with Bryan Singer’s leather-daddied but largely comics-accurate take on X-Men. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man was still a year-and-half away, and they’d have to suffer through attacking Hulk dogs and Nick Nolte’s over-acting before the Nolanverse and the dawn of the MCU and the ascension of comic book films into the mainstream. While perhaps not so much a harbinger of today’s cinematic comic book craze as a milestone on the road to mainstream respectability, Unbreakable scratched a certain itch for some strains of fandom and confirmed for others that this M. Night Shyamalan guy was somebody worth paying attention to, someone capable of elevating genre ideas and showing us all something new.
Like any deconstruction of superheroes, Unbreakable owes a couple bucks to Watchmen, but in terms of sketching out a realistic portrait of what superpowers might look like in the real world, it does its predecessor one better. For all its supposed “realism,” Watchmen still features non-superpowered characters wearing impractical costumes and kung-fuing guys with guns (presciently predicting the “real life superhero” craze that would become fodder for documentaries and “look at these pathetic assholes” journalism[1], wherein schlubby sad-sacks would don homemade costumes and lie about having extensive martial arts skills whilst patrolling real-life cities), a supposed super genius whose master plan rests on his assumption that all the Philistines around him wouldn’t remember that “Ozymandias” is the Greek name for Ramses II, and a blue-skinned god whose defining characteristic is his steadfast refusal to put on some goddamn pants already. Unbreakable read more like a thought experiment carried out by someone who was actually interested in working out how superheroes might exist with our world’s physics, and what’s more neatly solved the problem any superhero story has: how the hell are Batman or Moon Knight or Daredevil so regularly able to interrupt crimes in progress? Granted, the conceit of David Dunn reading people’s minds by touching them is fantastical, but could be explained as a inner delusion created to help filter his subconscious mentalism[2] or perhaps some actual biological process. Still, the film presented a fairly convincing (and thoroughly entertaining) argument for the existence of superhumans. The influence of Unbreakable was far-reaching--shows like Heroes took the ideas of real-life superheroes and ran with them[3], while NetFlix’s MCU tie-in shows took the relatively short-lived success of Heroes as an excuse to rarely show its characters in costume[4].
The problem with being such an influential genre cornerstone is that revisiting the source material, in the wrong context, can make the progenitive work actually feel derivative of what’s come after it.
Which is probably the least of Glass’ sins.
The purpose of the rather lengthy preamble to this essay is to firmly illustrate the importance and relevance of Unbreakable, as any discussion of its sequel (skipquel?) must be heavily informed by an understanding of the source material. Glass is not its own movie, nor does it try to be. David Dunn isn’t established as a character in the film, rather we’re caught up through some truly stilted dialogue as to what he’s been doing for the last sixteen years[5]--the “I’m going for a walk” exchange between Dunn and son of Dunn is awkward, and seems doubly hamfisted when one realizes it’s occurring in front of a cameoing Shyamalan himself. Similarly, Kevin Wendell Crumb and Casey Cooke simply show up, and if one hasn’t seen Split only a surreptitious, in-theatre Google search will catch one up in time to try to enjoy this movie. This is not to say that a Star Wars-eque screen crawl is needed; rather, this movie has firmly positioned itself as primarily for the fans of the first two, rather than it’s own thing (as the first two films were).
That’s an okay and even necessary approach for a sequel, but the first thing a sequel needs to do is justify its existence. A movie, by definition, has a beginning, middle, and end. Even a two-parter by design like Avengers: Infinity War fits this structure--scrap the to be continued title card and it’s a standalone flick that works pretty well (albeit a tad depressing). Because a movie, definitionally, has a beginning, middle and end, it’s also definitionally a story that has been told. Sequels must conjure up a new story for these characters (albeit running with threads established in the previous films, certainly) and must demonstrate that this is a story worth telling. What more must be said about these people, this world?
Shyamalan took an interesting approach here, using a stinger to reveal that the events of Unbreakable and Split took place in the same world, making Split a companion piece to the first movie. Glass is a sequel to both, in the same way the first Avengers movie was a sequel to the Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man movies. Thematically, the first two movies in the ad hoc trilogy pair well together--the first is the story of an ordinary man learning that he’s extraordinary, and the second is the story of a young woman learning to tap into stores of resiliency and courage she didn’t know she had.
The meta-problem with Glass is that it doesn’t share this thematic resonance. As a capstone to the first two movies, Glass illustrates the dichotomy between characters learning and characters growing, and not in a good way.
No one grows in Glass. Rather characters learn information about their world, about their own circumstances, but those revelations don’t lead to any personal change. David Dunn begins the movie as an aging superhero, determined to keep pushing the limits of the powers he discovered in Unbreakable. Kevin Wendell Crumb begins the movie as 23 separate personalities vying for supremacy. Elijah Glass begins the movie (partway through, strange for a movie named for him) as an apparently doped-up supergenius, secretly hiding his mood-altering pills and working towards his master plan.
When the credits roll, all three are dead, but none have changed in any meaningful way. Dunn dies as he lived, willing to fight for what he believes to be right but ultimately succumbing to the same Achilles heel that’s plagued him all his life--water. Crumb meets a similar fate, with the added subtextual wrinkle that his final moment of humanity is also a moment of weakness, which makes the viewer wonder whether he should have ignored Casey Cooke’s entreaties and kept eating cheerleaders. Glass is perhaps the purest distillation of the static nature of the characters--for the entire film he’s pulling the strings with his brilliant mind, and never suffers a second of real self-doubt. He knows his plan is going to work, and any indications to the contrary are mere subterfuge on his part, robbing him of any arc and any tension.
Worse still is Dr. Ellie Staple, the narrative adhesive that binds Dunn, Crumb, and Glass. Her character is something of a mirror to Glass--like Elijah, her “arc” is the shedding of her disguise, nothing more. In the end, at her core, she’s the same person we met in the beginning, only now we learn what she’s really been working on the entire time, just like Glass. Her goals don’t change, her worldview doesn’t change--just her methods.
This isn’t storytelling, it’s a Wikipedia entry with punching.
Contrast this with Split. Casey Cooke goes from frightened victim to empowered survivor, learning to manipulate Crumb’s various personalities. She befriends and exploits Hedwig, defiles herself to drive off Dennis, and ultimately confronts the Beast by turning the abuse she suffered at the hands of her uncle into battle armor.
Contrast this with Unbreakable. David Dunn goes from underachieving security guard to a man who discovers he actually does have the ability to make a difference in the world, to answer the internal call that led him to become a security guard in the first place.
In the previous movies, both characters learn things about themselves and become better versions of themselves. Stronger versions of themselves. In Glass, the characters uncover information, not truths, and then die. Unceremoniously, at that.
Which brings us back to sequels, and how they need to justify their existence from a story perspective (financial justifications are obvious). What did we still need to learn about David Dunn or Kevin Wendell Crumb at the end of their respective movies?
Nothing. Their stories were complete.
Slapping them together in the same film is a gee-whiz flashbulb of a marketing idea that seemed brilliant, but also needed an actual story stapled onto its MTV Deathmatch-esque premise. The prospect of a dust-up between the two is certainly a fun idea for fans to comprehend, and such what-ifs have a long, storied history in the comics community, but on the occasions we’ve seen these fanboy fever dreams realized the results have been decidedly underwhelming. How many Mountain Dew-fueled arguments over whether Superman or the Hulk would win in a fight went down after hours at comic book conventions, and how deflated were the fans when a lackluster crossover like 1996’s D.C. Versus Marvel actually hit newstands[6]?
With Glass, the subversion of expectation actually becomes the nullification of tension and thus the audience’s own enjoyment. Giving us the Dunn/Crumb main event about twenty minutes into the film was a bold choice, and one that largely failed. Sure, we get a reprise at the very end, but the fight is informed solely by the characters’ powers, which have been explored in the previous films. Neither character has grown over the course of Glass, and so when they square off again it’s just power versus power. Effectively, it’s the same damn fight Shyamalan showed us in the first twenty minutes.
In Spider-Man, Peter Parker has to learn to use his powers and make peace with his uncle’s death in order to defeat the Green Goblin. In The Dark Knight Rises, Bruce Wayne has to divest himself of all Batmannery in order to find the strength to smash the League of Shadows. In Ant-Man, Scott Lang has to put aside his selfishness and fight for something bigger than himself in order to take down Yellowjacket.
In Glass, David Dunn learns nothing and fails, and Elijah Glass wins without trying. That’s hardly satisfying. The opposite, really.
That’s not to say that every superhero movie needs a happy ending or for the hero to triumph. Tragedy is not automatically incompatible with tights--see the Dark Phoenix Saga or Frank Miller’s run on Daredevil. Watchmen has something of a tragic ending--the sociopathically violent yet principled Rorschach refuses to compromise his ethics for the greater good (at least Adrian Veidt’s greater good) and chooses literal, rather than spiritual, death.
The difference between those comics and their film adaptations and Glass is that either the protagonist doesn’t die themselves (Daredevil #181), or there’s an ensemble cast that we’re invested in to absorb the shock (Wolverine and Cyclops/Nite Owl II, Laurie Jupiter, and even Dr. Manhattan). In Glass, there’s no clear protagonist (see above points about the lack of character arc), and the deaths of the characters who one could best argue are the protagonist have little impact. The deaths of Dunn, Crumb and Glass all feel relatively pointless, with only Glass’ having any kind of resonance and even then only in light of the final twist--there’s some nobility in his death, but only if one draws a flow chart.
The really frustrating thing is that there’s the seeds of a very cool movie here. With a few changes, the film could actually work. Like a simple embrace of the principles of character development, for starters. A large chunk of the movie (too large for some) is devoted to three-way therapy sessions with Dunn, Crumb, and Glass, moderated by Dr. Staple. This device is practically a cheat code for character development, and yet Shyamalan chooses to do nothing with it but gaslight the audience and undermine the credibility of his own previous movies. If Dunn took advantage of the sessions and the power-dampening device in his cell[7] to confront and overcome his fear of water, the final fight between him and the Beast would have been that much more powerful. Imagine the Overseer[8] and the Beast squaring off in front of the asylum, the lives of innocents hanging in the balance, and David Dunn is armed with not just his superpowers but the knowledge that he’s already triumphed over his greatest foe. When the fight takes him and the Beast into the conveniently-placed water tank, Dunn’s apparent weakness could become a strength.
Just like Casey Cooke in Split--a movie that actually works.
At the very least, a little character development would have precluded the possibility of Dunn being drowned in two inches of dirty water by an extra, which is such an ignominious fate that I can’t help but wonder if Shyamalan secretly and pathologically hated one of his best creations these last nineteen years. It might also have tamped down Shyamalan’s urges to throw a twist in at the end, logic be damned. Dunn’s murder happens in concert with the reveal that Dr. Staple is secretly working for a super-secret organization who’s been secretly making sure that superhumans stay confined to four-color newsprint for basically all of humanity’s existence. The reveal explains why she’s been such a horrible doctor for two hours, but the problem is that Glass exists in a post-Heroes and post-MCU Sokovia Accords universe. It’s an idea we’ve seen over and over again, but instead of wearing horn-rimmed glasses and accompanied by a silent Haitian man it’s got a silly shamrock tattoo[9].
Crafting a sequel to a movie that came out decades before is extremely difficult (see Indiana Jones, the latter-day Die Hards, Halloween 2018, etc.). As mentioned above, the movie has to contend with all the properties that were inspired by the source material. The logical or illogical extension of twenty-year-old plot threads might seem stale when compared to newer movies or TV shows so informed by said threads, and in this case it is.
The twist is boring. The character deaths aren’t satisfying. And the surviving characters are bland[10]. To compare Glass to another Bruce Willis film, imagine if John McClane, Holly Gennaro, and the dad from Family Matters all bought it at the end of Die Hard, and hostage #4 randomly decided to go after the remaining members of the Gruber clan.
Who cares?
We’re living in an age where fans unrealistically call for mulligans on movies that just came out, The Last Jedi being the most prominent example[11]. Ordinarily stuff like that makes me roll my eyes[12], but when I see a promising film screwed up this badly, it really makes me wish M. Night would pick up the phone and call a first-year film student to consult on an immediate do-over.
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-legend-of-master-legend-243895/
[2] As Dr. Ellie Staple argues in Glass, in one of the film’s better moments.
[3] Sometimes straight back into the Land of Implausibility, but still.
[4] A low point nicely illustrated by the Goodwill chic look of Iron Fist and the time Daredevil borrowed Jessica Jones’ scarf in The Defenders to fight a bunch of ninjas.
[5] The film’s timeline indicates it takes place weeks after Split, placing the film a few years in the past.
[6] Back when newstands were a thing--R.I.P.
[7] A series of pipes douse him with water if he gets out of hand, which made me wonder how the hell he showers.
[8] A really clunky name, and I’m kind of surprised there weren’t a deluge of think-pieces hamfistedly dissecting how “problematic” it is call yourself the Overseer when your nemesis is a black dude.
[9] I can’t tell if Shyamalan intended the shamrock tattoos the secret anti-super society wears as an allusion to the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang or like Halloween 3 or something.
[10] Which makes me wish Shyamalan pulled a Halloween 4 and had Casey Cooke start talking like Hedwig in the stinger.
[11] A kerfuffle which left me baffled. I’m still trying to figure out how detractors and defenders of the movie can get so worked up about a two-hour commercial for Disneyland.
[12] Unless I’m doing it--ex. Halloween 2018/what I’m about to say above.
Extremely excited to announce my novella I’M NOT EVEN SUPPOSED TO BE HERE TODAY drops March 1st from Eraserhead Press as part of their New Bizarro Author Series!
After a killer surf session, Scot Kring stops into his local Fasmart for a delicious, icy Slushpuppy. But before he can leave, a homeless guy outside has a stroke and accidentally recites an ancient Latin phrase that summons a very hungry demon, who just so happens to look like filmmaker Kevin Smith.
Now Scot's stuck in a time loop along with the other occupants of the convenience store who may or may not be demonically possessed and he's fighting back with nothing but a fistful of greasy hot dogs and a souvenir Slushpuppy cup as the giant menacing kaiju Kevin Smith threatens to kill them all.
I'm Not Even Supposed to Be Here Today is a demon apocalypse comedy for the slacker generation.
But don’t take my word for it, here’s Stephen Graham Jones:
"Sometimes you stop by the convenience store for a slushy and the world just goes straight to hell, and takes you along with it. I haven't had this much fun watching terrible stuff happen in a long time." -Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mongrels
If you don’t hate joy you can preorder the new novella right here.
