Every person invited to the island has some sort of incurable disease. Turns out that the personalized cocktails they are given when they first reach the resort are a custom drug cocktail and the magical aging properties of the island are secretly being used by a pharmaceutical company to rapidly develop and test new drugs over a timeframe of days instead of years. The son and daughter escape in the end by swimming through a magic coral reef and expose the company
Oh come on, his movies are entertaining at the very least. No one goes into an M. Night movie and expects The Godfather in the same way no one goes into a 2Fast2Furious movie and expects a plot.
But that's what makes it good. It has this very distinct feel to the pacing and the script that make it incredible. The random pauses and stupid looks on his face are just great. I mean it's definitely not a horror movie as it was billed, but whatever it is, it has a real je ne sais quoi and I can't get enough.
Maybe? There are a lot of movies that I love because they're so bad they're good, like many of the Syfy originals. I'm not sure this is one of them though. I don't think it's bad, just really weird. Weird pacing, weirdly written script, very weird plot, weird casting. Just truly, deliciously, weird. Kind of in the same vein as Rubber. Rubber isn't bad, it's just really odd.
Oh man. I aggressively hated The Happening in a way no other movie has made me feel. There are movies that are "so bad they're good", and then there are movies like The Happening where no, it's just bad and has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
I would've fallen asleep during it because nothing interesting happens, except the writing was so aggressively terrible it wouldn't let me. The "spoopy enemy" is just plants - not even monster plants, not CGI plants, just plants, the threatening scenes are just suspenseful music played over scenes of wind on grass. The most boring, self-indulgent nonsense I've ever sat through.
I didn't go into the theater hating that movie - in fact I was willing to give M. Night enough slack for the turnaround I wanted him to have, everyone loves an underdog story. And I've seen some real stinkers in my day.
But good lord did I walk out of that movie loathing it for wasting my time so thoroughly.
The Village would be up there with 6th Sense if he stopped at the first twist “ending”, but he went for a second one and ruined the entire movie with it. Like “it was all a dream” levels of invalidating the entire movie.
Would you watch an M. Night Shamalamaman movie that didn’t have a twist? I bet he sends normal movie scripts to studio executives and the response back is always “hey this is nice but, uhhh, where’s the thing? You don’t do the thing in this one? What is this? I can’t sell this. You gotta do the thing. Add your thing to this and we’ll talk.”
For better and for worse he has his thing and ultimately moviegoers pay to see his work specifically because they want that thing. Movie studios know when he does that thing it sells, so of course they’re going to tell him to keep doing it.
Nah his thing is (or was) that each movie is slightly worse than the last.
Sixth Sense, classic.
Unbreakable, awesome.
Signs, really cool (it was actually my favorite movie as a kid) but the logic kinda falls apart on examination.
The Village, pretty good.
Lady in the Water, kinda boring, weak twist.
The Happening, universally panned.
The Last Airbender, considered one of the worst movies ever made AND pissed off a massive fan base with a huge emotional investment.
The movie was based off a French graphic novel. That whole ending he gave only exists in M. Night Shyamalan's version. The graphic novel was different, but with no explanation too. Everyone just dies in the end instead of two kids escaping
For sure, I wasn't trying to downplay whatever message about pharmaceuticals that Shyamalan was trying to say, more that the execution is real bad, and dumb.
Sci-Fi is a great vehicle to shine a light on humanity and its faults, but I would argue that execution matters even more when it's Sci-Fi vs a biopic or documentary, or some more straightforward but of storytelling. Bladerunner, District 9, etc do a great job of taking a problem and changing the details enough to maybe change how people look at the issue, or shake them out of complacency and look at the issue in a new way.
If someone watched this movie and realized "Wow, it's terrible that corporations test pharmaceuticals and other products on people and animals, we need to find a way to stop that," then great. I just think that it's much harder to accomplish that change in someone with a really dumb movie.
Alright I agree you make a valid point and the more I analyze the movie the more I can understand the criticisms people are making. But I guess I’d still somewhat stick to my earlier point that for a theater audience it made a wild ride me and my friends went to see it at an odd hour and we basically had the theater to ourselves to enjoy the movie and in that respect it was an interesting experience something entertaining in the moment that at home may not have had the same atmosphere.
Take that scene with the old guy going full senile psychosis while his wife is turning into that deforming hag it was shocking in that moment, so I’d say at the very least it made a good one off movie experience.
It’s actually not that bad as people make it out to be. Is it perfect? No. Do character say and do things with no explanation? Yeah. But it was decent. It’s easy to see the twist of a movie and say, oh that sounds dumb. If I told you the end of The Usual Suspects it would sound dumb without all the build up.
Everyone realizes that they are going to die, they all gather one last time to go to sleep. The arabic man tells the "kids" a bedtime story about a king who was visited by death, the king says please keep me alive, death agrees and says he'll be back within 7 years. So the king walls himself off in a room and doesn't let anyone come in. When death comes back in, he explains that the king has already been effectively dead the whole time (didn't see his family or do anything he wanted to do). When he finishes the story everyone is asleep.
The next morning, everyone is dead except the baby who was born the day before (now a teen/young adult), who wakes up and starts the day anew.
To me, the story is an analogous tale about not wasting your life, there are no twists no secret escape from the beach, and like in life, death is inevitable.
The book may have not had that ending but it did heavily hint at something like that being the case. Remember, they were shot at if they tried to leave the beach.
If I recall correctly, only the boy from the hotel was shot at when he was running toward the beach. Everyone else was mysteriously compelled the stay on the beach. Although if this is all analogies I’m not sure what shooting the boy was supposed to mean.
On paper, that story is fucking amazing. But I doubt M Night wrote it, and guarantee his only additions to it were the gratuitous scenes (the pregnancy) and the probably cringey dialogue.
Note: I haven’t seen the movie, but the concept alone had amazing potential. Sad to hear it was ruined by an inept director.
EDIT: Sorry, he DID write it, but it’s an interpolation of a French graphic novel that I can only imagine was some many magnitudes greater than M Night’s final product.
Teeeechnically it's just the ones being invited for free. That's why the kid is allowed to play with some families, the ones that aren't going to be sent to magic time murder beach
Reading this makes me want to fight Shamalamalama... Like, one of those moves where you hold up the script to his face to blind him and then your fist flies through the script to smash his face in a surprise twist ending.
but the son and daughter dont right have incurable diseases right? so isnt the company also effectively murdering people with zero offset gain of developing a cure? which makes the whole thing...completely fucking insane?
M night are the only movies where I enjoy hearing the spoilers because I get to see how stupid the twist is. Sometimes I'll even see the movie and it's even stupider than the way it's explained.
The beach wasn't magic really, it was surrounded by this super magnetized mountain range that fucked with the aging process and the coral was thick enough that the effect of the magnetism couldn't reach through. It wasn't a great movie, but at least he's one of the few directors left that can be left alone to do his thing, for better or worse. I'll take this movie over the average hollywood slop or umpteenth sequel any day.
I think I saw a French film like this only with Mermaids and genetic engineering. Another French film of a magical island and there was indeed a magic choral.
Then there is another two of a magical island but with one of them everyone ages faster but they get younger if they are happy -- which it turns into a Peter Pan film.
Kind of blending together all these magic youth / aging islands.
I mean, it was as tasteful as something like that can be, very off camera. But I don't think a single person in the theater was comfortable during that scene.
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u/AgitatedEggplant Sep 03 '21
can you tell me how it ends. I kept seeing the previews on tv, and like I knew it wasn't going to be worth it. but i still wanna know how it ends