Unbreakable

Unbreakable
Directed by	M. Night Shyamalan
Produced by	M. Night Shyamalan Barry Mendel Sam Mercer
Written by	M. Night Shyamalan Comic Book: Kevin Smith
Starring	Bruce Willis Samuel L. Jackson Robin Wright Penn Spencer Treat Clark
Music by	James Newton Howard
Cinematography	Eduardo Serra
Editing by	Dylan Tichenor
Studio	Blinding Edge Pictures
Distributed by	Touchstone Pictures
Release date(s)	United States: November 22, 2000 Australia: November 30, 2000 New Zealand: December 7, 2000 United Kingdom: December 19, 2000
Running time	107 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$75 million
Gross revenue	$248.12 million

Unbreakable is a 2000 psychological thriller film written, produced and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. The film stars Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Wright Penn and Spencer Treat Clark. Unbreakable tells the story of Philadelphia security guard, David Dunn, who slowly discovers that he is actually a real life superhero. The film is a study on the dimensions of comic books; it explores the analogies between the real world and the mythology of superheroes.

Shyamalan originally conceived the idea for Unbreakable to parallel a comic book's traditional three-part story structure. After he decided to settle on the origin story aspect of his outline, Shyamalan began to write the screenplay as a spec script with Bruce Willis already set to star in the film and Samuel L. Jackson in mind to portray Elijah. Filming for Unbreakable began in April 2000 and finished that following July. Unbreakable received average reviews from critics and grossed approximately $250 million in box office totals.

Plot

Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) is born with Type I osteogenesis imperfecta, a rare disease in which bones break easily. As a child he is taunted by other children, who nickname him "Mr. Glass". Drawing on what he has read in comic books during his many hospital stays, Price theorizes that if he is frail at one extreme, then perhaps there is someone strong at the opposite extreme.

Security guard David Dunn (Bruce Willis) is also searching for meaning in his life. He gave up a promising football career to marry his love Audrey (Robin Wright Penn), but their marriage is dissolving, to the distress of their young son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark). Returning from a job interview in New York, David is the sole survivor of a horrific train wreck that kills 131 passengers, sustaining no injuries. He is contacted by the adult Elijah, who proposes to a disbelieving David that he is a real instance of the kind of person after whom comic-book superheroes are modeled. David tries to ignore him, but Elijah stalks him and his wife, trying to get his attention. David's son Joseph already idolizes his father and easily believes his father is a superhero - even to the extent of taking his father's pistol, loading it with bullets, and then pointing it at his father saying that if he pulls the trigger his father would not die; but his father manages to talk him out of the deed. But Audrey believes that Elijah Price has probably become mentally ill as a result of the stress of his frailty.

To relieve his family from further distress, David finally agrees to hear Elijah out, and begins to test himself. While lifting weights with Joseph, they discover that his physical strength has no limit. Under Elijah's influence, David develops his security guard hunches into extra-sensory perception, with which he can glimpse immoral acts committed by people he touches. We also see in a flashback the "injury" that ended David's football career: A car accident he and Audrey were in. He was not only unharmed, but ripped a door off the car in order to save her.

David's faith in Elijah is shaken when he remembers an incident from his childhood in which he almost drowned. However, Elijah intuits that the incident was an encounter with his one viable weakness: water. At Elijah's suggestion, he walks through a crowd in a Philadelphia train station and witnesses crimes perpetrated by strangers who brush past him: a jewel thief, a racist hate crime perpetrator and a rapist. The worst offender is a sadistic janitor holding a family hostage and torturing them inside their home. David follows the janitor back to the victims' house. He is ambushed by the lurking janitor who throws him off a balcony into a pool below, where he nearly drowns but is rescued by the children he freed. He then subdues the janitor, but finds the parents already dead. That night, he reconciles with his wife. The next morning, he shows the newspaper article of his anonymous heroic act to his son, but also gestures with his hand that he does not want his son to tell Audrey about it.

In the closing act of the film, David attends an exhibition at Elijah's comic book art gallery and gets to meet Elijah's mother (Charlayne Woodard). After talking with Elijah in the back room of his studio, David shakes his hand and discovers in horror that Elijah orchestrated three fatal disasters, causing hundreds of deaths—the last being David's train accident. Elijah insists that the deaths were justified as a means to find David. He explains that his purpose in life is to be the archvillain to David's hero, even going so far as to suggest that his childhood moniker, "Mr. Glass", should have alerted him to the fact that he was always a villain. The final captions reveal that David led police to Elijah, who was committed to an institution for the criminally insane.

Development

Production

When M. Night Shyamalan first conceived the idea for Unbreakable, the outline originally had a comic book's traditional three-part structure (the superhero's "birth", his or her struggles against general evil-doers, and the hero's ultimate battle against the "archenemy"). Finding the "birth" section more interesting, he decided to write Unbreakable as an origin story. During the filming of The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan had already approached Bruce Willis for the lead role of David Dunn.^[1] With Willis and Samuel L. Jackson specifically in mind for the two leading characters, Shyamalan began to write Unbreakable as a spec script^[2] during post-production on The Sixth Sense.^[3]

With the financial and critical success of The Sixth Sense in August 1999, Shyamalan gave the Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group a first look deal for Unbreakable. In return, Disney purchased Shyamalan's screenplay at a "spec script record" for $5 million. He was also given another $5 million to direct. Disney decided to release Unbreakable under their Touchstone Pictures banner, and also helped Shyamalan establish his own production company, Blinding Edge Pictures.^[4] Julianne Moore dropped out of portraying Audrey, David's wife, in favor of her role as Clarice Starling in Hannibal. Robin Wright Penn was cast in her place.^[5] Principal photography began on April 25, 2000 and ended that following July. The majority of filming took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where the film takes place.^[6]

Shyamalan and cinematographer Eduardo Serra chose several camera angles to simulate the look of a comic book panel. Various visual, narrative motifs were also applied. Several scenes relating to the "Mr. Glass" character involve glass. As a newborn, he is primarily seen reflected in mirrors, and as a young child, he is seen reflected in a blank TV screen. When he leaves his calling card on the windshield of David Dunn's car, he's reflected in a glass frame in his art gallery. Jackson requested his walking stick be made of glass to make his character more menacing. Using purple as Mr. Glass's color to David Dunn's green was also Jackson's idea.^[7] Mr. Glass' hair wig was modeled after Afro-American statesman Frederick Douglass.^[1] As he does in his other films, Shyamalan makes a cameo appearance. He plays a man who David suspects of dealing drugs inside the university stadium. More than 15 minutes of footage was deleted during post-production of Unbreakable. These scenes are available on the DVD release.^[8]

Cast

As is usual in his films, Shyamalan is seen in a brief cameo.

Music

Film score composer James Newton Howard was approached by Shyamalan to work on Unbreakable immediately after scoring The Sixth Sense. "He sat there and storyboarded the whole movie for me", Howard said. "I've never had a director do that for me."^[11] Shyamalan wanted a "singularity" tone for the music. "He wanted something that was very different, very distinctive, that immediately evoked the movie when people heard it,"^[11] Howard explained. Howard and Shyamalan chose to simplify the score, and minimized the number of instruments (strings, trumpets and piano), with limited orchestrations. Some of the compositions were recorded in a converted church in London. "You could have recorded the same music in a studio in Los Angeles, and it would have been great, but there is something about the sound of that church studio," Howard remarked. "It's definitely more mysterioso."^[11]

Comic book references

Cult filmmaker and comic book writer Kevin Smith felt Unbreakable was briefly similar to a comic book titled The Mage. Written and illustrated by Matt Wagner, Mage follows a wizard who convinces an Average Joe to try and find out if he's a superhero. Both Unbreakable and Mage are set in Philadelphia. Elvis Mitchell from The New York Times mentioned the visual similarities between David Dunn on patrol in his poncho and the DC Comics character known as The Spectre.^[12]

As in comic books, the main characters have their identified color schemes. David's is green and Elijah's is purple. The colors show up in their clothes, the wallpaper and bed sheets in their houses, Elijah's note to David, and various personal items, among others.^[1] The people whose bad deeds are sensed by David are identified by an article of clothing in a single bright color (red, orange), to contrast them with the dark and dreary comic book color scheme.^[1]

Release

Box office/DVD

Unbreakable was released in the United States on November 22, 2000 in 2,708 theaters, earning $30.33 million in its opening weekend. The film went on to gross $95.01 million in the United States and $153.11 million internationally, totaling a worldwide gross of $248.12 million.^[13] Unbreakable faced early competition from How the Grinch Stole Christmas,^[14] but managed to set opening weekend box office records in Brazil.^[15] Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment released Unbreakable as a two-disc special edition DVD in June 2001.^[16] The film made an additional $95 million in DVD sales.^[17]

Critical reception

Critical reaction was split on this film with a slight majority of reviews listed as "favorable" at movie review websites.^[18][19] Critics general noted the weaker ending, as compared to Shyamalans previous film The Sixth Sense.^[20]

Roger Ebert largely enjoyed the film, but was disappointed with the ending. Ebert believed that Willis' "subtle acting" was positively different from Willis' usual work in "brainless action movies".^[21] Richard Corliss of Time magazine reviewed that Unbreakable continued Shyamalan's writing/direction of "balancing sophistication and horror in all of his movies".^[22] Desson Thomson from The Washington Post wrote that "just as he did in The Sixth Sense, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan leads you into a fascinating labyrinth, an alternative universe that lurks right under our noses. In this case, it's the mythological world and, in these modern times, the secret design to that labyrinth, the key to the path, is contained in comic books."^[23]

Kenneth Turan, writing in the Los Angeles Times, gave a negative review, arguing that Unbreakable had no originality. "Whether it means to or not, the shadow of The Sixth Sense hangs over Unbreakable", Turan reasoned "if The Sixth Sense hadn't been as big a success as it was, this story might have been assigned to oblivion, or at least to rewrite."^[24] Todd McCarthy of Variety mostly criticized Shyamalan's writing and the performances given by the actors. However, he did praise Dylan Tichenor editing and James Newton Howard's music composition.^[25]

Shyamalan admitted he was disappointed by the reaction Unbreakable received from the general public and critics.^[26] Shyamalan also disliked Touchstone Pictures' marketing campaign. He wanted to promote Unbreakable as a comic book movie, but Touchstone insisted on portraying it as a psychological thriller, similar to The Sixth Sense.^[27]

Sequels rumors

This film had rumors of possible sequels circulating in on different interview and film fansites after its release. In 2000, Bruce Willis was quoted as hoping for an Unbreakable trilogy^[28]. In December 2000, Shyamalan denied rumors he wrote Unbreakable as the first installment of a trilogy saying he was not even thinking about it.^[28] In August 2001, Shyamalan stated that, because of successful DVD sales, he had approached Touchstone Pictures about an Unbreakable sequel, an idea Shyamalan said the studio originally turned down because of the film's poor box office performance.^[29] In a September 2008 article, Shyamalan and Samuel L. Jackson said there was some discussion of a sequel when the film was being made that mostly died with the poor box office. Jackson said he was still interested in a sequel but Shyamalan was non-committal.^[30]

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Unbreakable

• Unbreakable at the Internet Movie Database
• Unbreakable at Allmovie
• Unbreakable at Rotten Tomatoes
• Unbreakable at Box Office Mojo