I find this more sad than anything.

Say what you want about his last five films. I know they range from okay to downright terrible, but there was a time when it was thought M. Night Shyamalan was going to join the ranks of Spielberg and Zemeckis in the world of great, but joyfully mainstream, directors.

And people we’re not dumb to think this.

The Sixth Sense is not just a great, subdued, horror movie. It is simply a great movie all around— a moving character drama that remains great even a decade after the whole world knows the twist ending. Not to write off that ending, however. The twist is iconic and still incredibly sad.

Though not as universally appreciated as The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable is one of the best super hero movies ever made. Though it is not based on a comic book, it was the first movie to take the idea of a comic book hero and ground it completely in reality. And it worked fantastically.

Both of these movies were smartly written, beautifully directed and brilliantly acted. Bruce Willis has never been better, and the performances Shyamalan got out of child actors Haley Joel Osment and Spencer Treat Clark (apparently he has a thing for kids with three names) are particularly great.

Over the next few years, Shyamalan went from Signs (a creepy and unique take on the alien invasion movie but with a completely unnecessary and tacked on attempt at spirituality) to The Village (great direction, great acting, somewhat stale writing and too obvious of a twist) to Lady in the Water (great direction and acting again, but brought down by the somewhat confusing script and its heavy handed approach at criticising critics) to The Happening (poor directing, acting and writing and a general sense of “Jesus Christ, is this movie serious?) to The Last Airbender (his shot at redemption that resulted in the only movie my friend Sara has every walked out of the theatre during— and it was within the first half hour). The only consistently good thing about these movies have been James Newton Howard’s scores.

Airbender is particuarly upsetting because both audiences and critics were completely willing to give Shymalan the benefit of the doubt. Despite his recent track record, folks really thought he was going to pull this one off. He is supposedly a fan of the animated series, he’s always been a great visualist— really all he had to was hand the writing chores off to someone who could do a good job of condensing the story. This didn’t happen though. He decided to write the movie himself and somehow butchered the entire thing. The Last Airbender’s failures do not lie in its deviations from the series. Very rarely do those kinds of things end up being actual valid complaints against a movie. The Harry Potter franchise often changes from the source material but are frequently great movies. Instead, its failures apparently lie in virtually every other aspect of the film.

I will admit that I have not yet seen The Last Airbender, but I have heard from plenty of people who have. I cannot get myself to go see it with my two brothers, who loved the animated series, and see the looks on their faces when it ends up being just as everyone has described it us.

Like Shyamalan’s carreer path, that would be kind of heartbreaking.

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