Shyamalan, by contrast, doesn't make sequels or franchises (he turned down a chance to script Indiana Jones IV). He doesn't adapt Dan Brown best sellers, or Robert Ludlum potboilers, or Disney theme-park rides. He doesn't rely on CGI, or even use it much—and while he seems to love comic books as much as any of his Marvel and DC-adapting peers, his own superhero movie, Unbreakable, did something different and more interesting. Unbreakable feels incomplete at times, like a shard of a larger, better motion picture, and it doesn't use Bruce Willis' essential flatness and opacity nearly as well as The Sixth Sense did. But for all its flaws, it succeeds in bringing the superhero genre down to earth in ways that no Superman or Batman film could even think about attempting (consider the remarkable moment when Willis discovers his superhuman strength while lifting weights in the basement with his son). By example, the movie also hints that Singer's more conventional comic-book movies—and Raimi's and Nolan's, for that matter—are a good way to make a living, but a creative dead end.
Similarly, Steven Spielberg was widely praised for stripping last summer's War of the Worlds of countless genre tropes—panicked generals, heroic presidents, mad scientists, and so on. But it was Shyamalan's Signs, three years earlier, that was actually the more daring space-invader movie, in its attempt to meld science-fiction and horror by bringing the aliens home, to a single farmhouse and family, and using them as the sum of all our metaphysical fears. Sure, it lost momentum in the last act, with a literal deus ex machina and a less-than-frightening computer-generated alien, but then again, the third-act problem is one that no alien-invasion movie has managed to solve, Spielberg's least of all.
Even The Village, Shyamalan's least-liked movie to date, has a great deal to recommend it. A weird, slight, and beautiful fable about utopia and modernity, it was dressed up as another twist-ending zapper and marketed as a Sixth Sense-style thriller, which left critics and audiences alike feeling understandably cheated. But if you strip away the studio hype and the director's showman tics, it makes an intriguing counterpoint to his earlier movies—as a partial rebuke to their credulous supernaturalism, perhaps, and as an attempt (by a director as sex-shy as Spielberg) to grope, with his blind heroine, through the comforts and terrors of fairy tales toward the darker wisdom of adulthood.
In The Village, as in all his films, Shyamalan seems to be aiming for something, amid our summers of high-grossing superhero movies and our winters of little-seen Oscar-bait projects, that's increasingly rare these days: a marriage of entertainment and art, of mass-market tastes and elite sensibilities. This is a hard combination to pull off, as his stumbles have demonstrated, but it's precisely the goal that the film industry, home to our last mass art form, ought to be aspiring to. So, Shyamalan deserves credit, despite his vanity and his missteps—not because he's succeeding, necessarily, but because he's willing to keep trying and unwilling to take his place with those timid, highly compensated directors who know neither victory nor defeat.
