Wow what a bummer!

Rating: 1/10 (8 May 2004)

*Spoilers?* Just another of Mr. Shyamalan's motion pictures full with illogical presumptions and other stuff you don't actually want to see in good movies!
I think Shyamalan hasn't really understood the essence of good movie making, he doesn't see the depth of it, but he admires a lot of great movie makers and is good at copying other directors and ideas, but he isn't capable of making this one a good movie by himself and by these means, maybe because he seems to do everything himself.
There are so many things which don't really do any good for the story:
How could that Elijah character come up with specifically David Dunn being a superhero? I guess there are a few people like Dunn who had lucky escapes, how could he be so sure it would be Dunn? Shyamalan worked on the presumption of WANTING to have Dunn be a superhero, so he went to great lengths to MAKE him one through presenting circumstantial evidence. Everybody knows that circumstantial evidence isn't normally enough to prove anything, but after enough circumstantial evidence is presented Shyamalan presumes he has PROVEN enough and just goes on with the story. That just leaves a big hole!
How at all did Elijah come to the assumption of there being real superheroes? Well I don't really got that at all! What stuck though was a very a very stupid explanation or whatever it was meant to be that ancient Egyptian writing was somehow connected to today's comic books. Silly in a sad way!
How in hell could a normal person like Dunn never have noticed that he wasn't ever sick or ill or damaged in any way? How would he need somebody who had never met him before to tell him that, with the result of Dunn finding out that that was the truth? Absolutely ridiculous!
Water! Again! Water seems to play a big roll in Shyamalan's movies or at least slightly because it felt like if water would have some climax role in this movie, but instead it became a very unnecessary and pointless swimming pool scene with absolutely no connection to anything important before or after!
The scene with the boy and the gun! What a waste of true drama! But where do such ideas come from, what events lead up to such dramatically enormous and powerful moments and what happens with those in the aftermath? Answer: The boy just had the gun and just had to point it at his father because he had to prove a point! What a completely chopped off way of putting drama into the movie! The boy could have been shown during the time he came up with the idea. His idea could have been explained and put into perspective! The boy should have been going through some kind of struggle with his conscience before doing that extreme thing, but no! He just gets the gun and points it at his father! The next freaked out thing was that the father shouted at the boy with the gun AFTER having tried a calm approach. A little more intelligent person would have known not to agitate or stress that boy any further in an aggressive way so that the boy wouldn't switch over into an aggressive-defence mode and in the process shoot the father by accident! Next: All just break down and sigh a little, instead of springing into action! The father should have gotten very angry at the boy, maybe even slapped him  just out of stress and relief at the same time! I'm not saying that that would have been cool or nice, but it would have been a bit more realistic, but what we instead see next time all of them are together is a scene that would actually make us believe nothing of that had ever happened and that it was forgotten and never spoken about. The wife didn't even tell Dunn to not leave the gun in the house anymore! Outrageously bad!
The list just goes on and on and on such things just pile up to a big mountain of nasty smelly stuff! Shyamalan seems to work in such a way that he knows that he wants certain elements in the movie, lets say an interesting idea and then some drama and here and there filmed from certain angles and such. Then he comes up with the interesting idea, then he tries extremely hard to explain his (in the end rather ridiculous) interesting idea by means of circumstantial evidence (because he himself can grasp the depth which would be needed to make his idea credible) and tries again and again. In the end he throws all scenes together, knitting those together with lose pieces of drama and that's it. So what you end up with is not a natural building of social storytelling structure, but some kind of chopped up salad in which you as the viewer must piece everything together yourself. And you are very lucky (or in fact unlucky, and I don't envy you if you do) if you manage to do so without compromising the viewing experience!

To visualize what I mean a bit more: Whenever the family is together or whenever Dunn and his wife meet there seems to be one topic on the table which doesn't really fully connect to anything they have recently been going on about, but it still advances the story because it is something new. The problem is that these advances are too big! Shyamalan tells you mostly about the waypoints in the story, NOT about the interesting and deep things: exactly HOW a character came up with his ideas, assumptions and reasons. And that is something utterly too easy, a cheap way out and it is not real story telling. It is like reading the back of the book. It kills the characters giving the idea of the movie all the space.
Bummer!
3/10