My son and I had not seen Split before tonight. Wow. I really do think it has to be worth watching that origin story to see Glass… which we will do this week hopefully
That’s what I admire about Split: It really takes the time it needs for a proper origin story, but if it were marketed as “here’s an origin story on a villain and there’s no superhero”, it would have been less appealing.
I’ve never walked out of a movie theater feeling like my time had been this intentionally wasted. An hour of nothing happening followed by nonsensical twists, incredibly cheesy and cheap action sequences, and a profoundly stupid ending.
This movie needed to be like 30% stupider.
My thoughts are still kind of a jumble. I don’t know if I hated this or liked it, but there are definitely some head-scratchers here.
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Don’t watch this if you haven’t seen Unbreakable and Split. There’s a ton of exposition (I’ll get to that later) but the movie dumps you into the narrative very much assuming you’ve seen the previous films.
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Before we walked into the theater, I jokingly suggested to my wife that it would be awesome if the drug dealer from Unbreakable and the apartment building super from Split bumped into each other in Glass. Imagine my face when Shyamalan popped up in this movie with that scene. It wasn’t the cheapo Bewitched split-screen twin effect I wanted, but it was close enough.
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Call it Glass, but have that character not even appear for 40 minutes, then literally not talk until the 70-minute mark. Okay.
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It was weird seeing the old deleted scenes material from Unbreakable integrated into this movie seemingly at random. They really had nothing to contribute to the new scenes they were used within. I guess Shyamalan was determined to get them on the big screen.
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Charlayne Woodard’s makeup effect was really distracting. It wasn’t as bad in Unbreakable because you only saw her twice in the old-age getup, but here it was used a lot, in full daylight, face-on to the camera.
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It was really nice seeing Spencer Treat Clark back as Bruce Willis’ son.
SPOILERS FOLLOW
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I appreciate the middle-finger to audience expectations, but I’m sure it’s generally a bummer for fans. To literally kill your Superman hero by drowning him in a parking lot puddle is bold, but kind of a downer that I don’t think most people will appreciate as a commentary on comic movies.
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Hey, M. Night! Stop explaining comics to your audience. We’re all very familiar with how comic stories work now. It’s not 2000 anymore.
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I cannot express how much I dislike the anti-superpowers secret society that meets in busy restaurants. It’s a dumb twist and a dumb concept. It retroactively makes Unbreakable dumb to know there were apparently David Dunn analogues out there before. Also, why did Dr. Ellie Staple feel the need to reveal this to David while he was drowning?
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“Osaka Tower: A True Marvel” - Hyuk yuk. Shut up Shyamalan.
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Why would people believe the easily disputable security cam footage? Wouldn’t the explanation be that it’s just an hoax?
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“It was an origin story all along!” Seriously. Shut up Shyamalan.
I thought it was fantastic. I hadn’t watched any trailers so I literally didn’t know what to expect, and it built tension. It’s the same effect as having a movie called “Jaws” and not seeing the shark until over halfway through the movie. And without spoiling anything, the movie is definitely about his character.
I didn’t even realize they were deleted scenes until you just said this, so I guess they must have fit. The one with Bruce Willis didn’t make as much sense, but the other one worked fine.
Agreed. It was way too close up and looked out of place. I’m surprised they didn’t get an older actress, but I guess they hadn’t in the original movie so it would be weird to start now.
Yeah he was great! I guess he’s still acting (he was on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. last season), so that’s a plus.
You’re the second person I’ve heard say, “I appreciate the ending, but I bet fans hate it”, which doesn’t make sense to me. If you like it (or at least appreciate it), why do you think other people wouldn’t? For the record, my son and I both really liked it. I’ll save further spoiler discussion for later.
I don’t think he spent half as much time explaining comics as he did in Unbreakable. I also don’t think that audiences know much more about comics now than they did in 2000. It’s not like he’s explaining email or Facebook or something.
It was a little heavy handed, but I didn’t think it was that annoying.
Man, I HATED the comic tropes exposition. A lot. The ones in Unbreakable were great because the bits were interesting on their own even for folks casually interested in comics, such as the line about the comic villain’s eyes being off-kilter to imply a “skewed perspective on the world.” It was something a lot of comic fans may not have known, and it fit the movie’s conceit. The exposition here was awful. Glass exclaiming that everyone was gathered like a classic showdown, or Casey trivia dumping that Superman couldn’t originally fly? Blech. In the first case, it’s like, no shit Glass, we’ve all seen a dozen superhero movies since 2000 with comic showdowns. In the second case, it was just howlingly clunky and had nothing to add to the scene.
As for me thinking fans may not like it, the audience reviews seem to bear that out so far.
Yes, the comic exposition was a little clunky, but I’ve never heard it referred to as “the showdown” before. In fact, I’m not even sure if that’s even an actual named thematic trope, or something that Shyamalan just made up for the film. So it’s definitely not a plot element that I would know by name.
Rotten Tomatoes has the movie as 36%, with the audience score at 79%. So maybe there are a lot of reviewers saying “I bet fans won’t like it”, but fan scores don’t seem to bear that out. I’m just confused by reviewers that try to put themselves in other people’s shoes, instead of just saying how they felt about it.
Fair enough. I liked the way it screwed with expectations, but I love The Mist, so YMMV.
I’m sure “showdown” was used in the generic sense that it’s a comic “big fight” as opposed to some industry/fan technical term.
See, that’s exactly how I saw it: that he was talking about “The Showdown” in the same way you would talk about “The Call to Adventure” or “Crossing the Threshold” in movie terminology.
Okay. Either way, I didn’t need it pointed out, nor did the characters in the movie.
I did, because the character in the movie was explaining his perception of the events that were going on. I wouldn’t have known that otherwise. It’s not like he was just spouting unrelated facts about comics.
But why? Glass telling everybody that the “main characters are all here, just like a big comics showdown” or whatever, was the most “no shit” moment ever. Yeah, Shyamalan, your audience knows that, and the characters in the movie know it too.
I’d argue that Casey’s trivia drop - “Did you know Superman couldn’t fly in the original comics, and that Metropolis is actually New York City?” is the very definition of pointless.
It’s great that you liked that stuff, but I thought it was clumsy and awful. There was a lot I did like in this movie, but it was lesser Shyamalan for me.
He specifically talks about the third act being a showdown just so he can later point out that it’s not really a showdown. He’s not telling you something about comics that you don’t know; he’s taking that knowledge and contextualizing it within the events of the movie.
Same thing with the “Did you know Superman couldn’t originally fly?” part: The point was that superheroes seem to do things that are fantastical, but their abilities were originally more realistic and grounded, like something a normal human with special abilities could do. He’s saying that superheroes were based on actual humans and not just adolescent power fantasies. It all applies to what’s happening in the film at that moment.
Sorry. It’s still garbage dialog to me.
Boy I really wish there was more than one other person who saw this movie and has an opinion it. No matter how you feel about the movie, it’s kind of sad that only two of us actually watched it (or care enough to talk about it).
Well, I didn’t see Split and I generally don’t like movies with captive, scared women, so that has kept me away. And I’m tired of Shyamalan’s surprise endings, so I’m thinking this is more a TV movie to catch. I am reluctant to commit the time or money, or drag my GF to see it and deal with the blowback if it sucks for someone (her) who never saw Unbreakable or Split. So sitting this one out.
Well I saw this last night and I expressively hated this movie. And yes all the added exposition scenes were completely horrible and rounded out some impressively bad dialogue through much of the movie. I also liked seeing Spencer Treat Clark again, but I thought all of his scenes with Bruce Willis were super clunky.
James McAvoy is the undoubted star of the show, and the stuff with him and Anya Taylor-Joy I thought were amazing. But it’s soooooo much drek. The superhero fights are terrible because M. Night doesn’t know how to film action–either there’s cheap CG, the occasional object being thrown, or a ton of antagonist cam shots which look like they came straight out of Finding Bigfoot.
And how they resolved these characters is horrible. I don’t want to spoil it for the unfortunate masses that think that this movie is the next Unbreakable and are apparently dominating the box office to see it, because it’s not. It’s horseshit. Everything in this movie winds up being the opposite of how it should have gone.
Glass is as if M. Night decided to out-do Rian Johnson but in his own movie trilogy.
— Alan
Saw this tonight. Generally terrible and one specific thing I hated for the same reason I hated Prometheus.
So these super smart people got together and built a holding facility for super people. They thought a lot about their powers and how to counter them. For Dunn it was the water setup. For the beast it was the strobe lights. Very effective.
And then they went and hired the biggest idiots ever to work in the place. Not only do they forget to lock doors, they jibber jabber for 10 minutes leaving nobody watching the prisoners, they allow themselves to be trivially tricked, they get up in the prisoner’s faces, etc.
And what were all the cameras for if nobody was actually watching them?!
I would have loved it if when Patricia tells that orderly to bend down and pick up that needle he just kicks it to her and left the room.
So many plot holes it’s hard to even count them. Why did the secret society leave the three people who now know about them alive? Joseph Dunn sees those “cops” murder his dad in cold blood and does nothing?
And the “resolution” as it was kinda made the whole movie pointless. Why does it exist again?
