M.Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable is a superhero movie that doesn’t play like a superhero movie. Instead it plays out as a drama that doesn’t reveal its true nature until the very end.
I must admit, upon realizing that it was an Shyamalan film I sort of rolled my eyes in an “Oh, great” sort of way, my only experiences with his works being “Signs,” which I saw years and years ago and so don’t remember much other than being scared and not getting it, and “The Last Airbender,” which was dreadful. I remember that most of his films have not done well, excepting the “Sixth Sense,” and so my expectation for this film was that, admittedly, it wasn’t be very good. What I should have remembered is that above all else M. Night Shyamalan loves a good twist at the end. So my expectations, being what they were and were not, were not met, but thwarted. It was a very good, effective film. I actually enjoyed it. And the expectation I should have had was also met. While Shyamalan spoiled the ending in his cameo at the football field in the blue jacket telling the audience that blue is bad, he did leave the ultimate reveal of Samuel L. Jackson’s Elijah Price as a sociopath until the very end.
The film itself sets up other expectations, some more obvious than others. The opening scene sets up the fragile nature of Elijah against the unbreakable nature of Bruce Willis’s David Dunn. The audience sees a broken child from a skewed point of view, a mirror. This is the nature of Elijah--fragile, skewed, and something we don’t expect. It catches the audience off guard when we realize that we’ve been looking at a reflection and not the real thing; that’s Elijah--he’s not the real thing, but David is. The scene is one shot, no cuts. That’s David--unbroken. That unbroken shot versus the broken child sets up the paradigm of the two characters in the film. Another expectation is the nature of the film itself. There are no bright colors, no spandex costumes, no high rises that people can leap off of or over in a single bound--just a suburb, mostly grey or beige with little bits of muted color and a guy with a dead-end job and family problems. It certainly doesn’t set up like a superhero film, but it ends up being one, in a weird way. It’s actually an “origin story” (“Unbreakable (film)”), but even then, it doesn’t feel like one. X-Men: First Class or X-Men Origins: Wolverine feel like superhero origin films from the colors to the swelling music to the way the film is actually plotted. Unbreakable has almost minimalist music, really using only “strings, trumpets and piano” rather than a full orchestra. That expectation of a drama is met, since the film really is a drama about self-discovery and other things, but it also exceeds it by being a superhero film. Another is Elijah’s name. In the Bible, in the Old Testament, Elijah is one of the biggest prophets; in the New Testament, Elijah, or John the Baptist as a representation of him, comes before Jesus does. That sets up the expectation that he comes before the hero or Jesus figure. In fact, Elijah has pictures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary behind him at his desk at the gallery. This expectation is met because Elijah does indeed come before David (who shares the name with the King of Israel and ancestor of Jesus) and sets the stage for him. One more expectation that is set up is water. We learn that David fears water the first time we see him on the train and once it’s mentioned a few times, we sort of realize that it’s probably something to watch out for and the film more than meets that expectation when David becomes a superhero in the scene at the end where he saves the kids from the man in red in the rain. He surmounts that fear when he survives the swimming pool. The film sets up loads of expectations and plays around with them.
While the film probably has a number of motifs, the most noticeable are the colors. David had two: yellow and green. As a superhero, it is green. He wears a green security jacket and has a green poncho that he wears when he becomes a superhero at the end. When he’s not a superhero, he is in yellow. He wears yellow shirts, yellow jackets, his house is yellow, even the lettering of his green jacket and poncho are yellow. David’s son even has a superhero toy that’s yellow with a green cape. Elijah’s is blue. The lighting in his office is blue, he’s always wearing blue, though usually as an almost hidden accent playing to the hiddle reveal at the end--blue is everywhere with him. There are other colors, most notably red, that are associated with evil and people doing bad things. When David’s son points the gun at him, he is wearing a red and yellow shirt. Yellow, because he’s David’s son and red because he’s about to shoot his father. The bad guy at the end is wearing red too. These colors show up throughout the film against the bland background of the suburbia tipping off the audience to the nature of the film.
Being a Shyamalan film, it has meaning in it. He doesn’t make mindless action films with no real depth to them--no, he makes films that portray a message. There’s the referential meaning: with the help of Elijah Price, David Dunn discovers the extraordinary hero inside of him set in the background of ordinary suburbia. The explicit meaning: David Dunn discovers his destiny as a superhero despite his average life. The implicit meaning: without evil, there cannot be good (“Unbreakable (film)”). The symptomatic meaning: the film looks into the sprawling, grey suburbia to see how life in the suburbs can grind out the extraordinary and how it takes a big event to draw us out of it.
In all, Shyamalan exceeds expectations through masterful filmmaking and gives us a look into the life of the average superhero.
"Unbreakable (film)." Wikipeadia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., n.d. Web. 11 Sept. 2012.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbreakable_(film)>.
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