Shyalaman Is Getting Old Fast

Rating: Null/10 (4 January 2006)

There's no doubt M. Night Shalaman is a talented storyteller and filmmaker, but after watching several of his films (The Six Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village), my main criticism is that he is too repetitive in that he essentially has made a career out of creating dark, brooding, slow-paced, two-hour+ long "Twilight Zone" episodes.
They simply are not appropriate for the medium of feature length film. Rod Serling and his co-writers were geniuses in that they could tell creative stories such as these in a brisk 23-minute teleplay -- where the final "surprise twist" ending packed at least ten times the punch as they do in Shalaman's films (if you're still awake by the end of them.) The TZ crew even discovered that an hour-long TV format (which they used during the show's fourth season) was not as effective as the shorter format.
And Comic Books, which form the inspiration for Unbreakable, are renowned for the creative brevity of their story-telling.
Another thing about these movies is even if you like the surprise endings, once you know what they are, you would be hard pressed to sit through repeated viewings of these long, drawn-out, albeit beautifully rendered, films.
I would, therefore, encourage M. Night Shyalaman to focus his considerable talent on shorter art forms including graphic novels, short films, and episodic anthology-style television. The Twilight Zone "franchise" has been revived a couple of times on television with various degrees of success. I predict if it were tried once again with M. Night Shyalaman as its driving creative force, it would be a big success.