COMICS CULTURE SHRAPNEL from CBEM 293
You see, Unbreakable is closely tied in with comic books, and not just as a plot device like so many of people are claiming in their negative reviews of it. Comics and superhero mythology forms the living, breathing soul of this movie. What we have is the distilled essence of those tales we all know so well, exposed for all the world to see. If not for the constant allusions to the printed page of comics, outsiders and even most fans wouldn't even recognize the story for what it is. All the masks and spandex has been removed, and the universe is not teetering on the brink of destruction. It's an ordinary world inhabited by ordinary people with very ordinary problems. It also sounds like it could be very boring.
But it's not. Shyamalan is a better storyteller than that. He knows how to blend the ordinary with the incredible and also give us the creeps in the process. We are given an ordinary man, David Dunn (Bruce Willis). Ex-football star, currently a security guard, having problems with his wife, cares about his kid. His troubled little life is interrupted by the catastrophe of a train crash where everyone is killed save David, who is unharmed. Suddenly his ordinary life is not so ordinary anymore. And maybe it never was....
So Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) would have us believe. Physically fragile all his life, unable to play like a normal child, finds his only solace in the four-color pages of comic books. He's been waiting all his life for someone like David: someone extraordinary. Someone with the ability to help others. Someone who could be... a superhero.
What follows is a war of philosophy, morals, facts, and beliefs as Elijah tries to convince David of this destiny, while David would just like to be what he's always believed he is: normal. We are basically being given two common archetypes of the superhero genre: the Spiderman philosophy of "with great power comes great responsibility" versus the tortured "I never wanted superpowers, I just want to be a normal human being, angst-angst-angst." The movie is an excellent portrait of what could possibly drive anyone to be a hero, why anyone would ever be possessed to risk their life, exactly what does that take?
There's also the ending. I can't tell you anything about it for fear of ruining the movie, but it's possibly the only thing that could be compared with "The Sixth Sense," in terms of shock value. I don't think telling you that gives anything away, because hopefully you'll be so wrapped up in the story by then.
A post on AICN stated that M. Night Shyamalan was creating a new comic book universe with his movies. A boy who can see and talk to ghosts, helping them reconcile and move on. A man who seemingly cannot be harmed, walking the streets in search of wrongdoing. It is a 'superhero' universe where everything is bound by the limits of the ordinary. Extraordinary people working within the harsh truths of reality. Goodness knows that if we had a vigilante like Batman here in New York City, Mayor Guiliani would have had him shot by now. That's right, shot. (I make no apologies for my anti-Guiliani stance.) Real life is neither pretty nor glamorous. Stories don't always have a happy ending. Unbreakable shows us that nothing is impossible. The extraordinary, the unbelievable.... superheroes can exist. We just won't recognize or hear about it.
Go see this movie. Maybe you'll hate it. Hopefully you'll love it. We need to see more intelligent film-making, and more mythology laid bare like this. See this movie because I want it to make money so I can see the other two movies made. As was reported on AICN, there's so much more to the story, this is only the beginning. There is so much out there to explore.