M Night Shymalan's Glass and THAT ending (HUGE SPOILERS)

[AnthonyO'Brien]

Just got back from Glass and loved it. Well worth the 18 year wait.

It has a VERY interesting ending (spoilers below). Please discuss AFTER you have seen the movie!














A secret society shows up that monitors super humans. Apparently they have been around for a VERY long time. Some viewers may hate this but ever since seeing Unbreakable I always thought there had to be others like David & Elijah, maybe even a secret government group watching them or using them. I thought there might be more to the psychiatrist when I saw the trailer. It makes me wonder who else was super human that they dealt with. Jesus? Joan of Arc? Salem witches? Definitely an ending that raises more questions than answers and I love M.Night for it. Wonder if the Black Clovers will show up in some of his future films

[Ilan Preskovsky]

Just got back from Glass and loved it. Well worth the 18 year wait.

It has a VERY interesting ending (spoilers below). Please discuss AFTER you have seen the movie!














A secret society shows up that monitors super humans. Apparently they have been around for a VERY long time. Some viewers may hate this but ever since seeing Unbreakable I always thought there had to be others like David & Elijah, maybe even a secret government group watching them or using them. I thought there might be more to the psychiatrist when I saw the trailer. It makes me wonder who else was super human that they dealt with. Jesus? Joan of Arc? Salem witches? Definitely an ending that raises more questions than answers and I love M.Night for it. Wonder if the Black Clovers will show up in some of his future films

I wasn't a huge fan of the twist. It's fine on its own terms, I suppose, (though hardly original) but there wasn't much build up to it and because I don't know if it's actually going anywhere, I thought it made the fate of our main characters fairly anticlimactic.

I'm torn about the film in general and the ending was one of my biggest sticking points.

[Jon Clark]

I could see that part of the twist coming and I've never been a fan of that particular approach.

spoilers:

1) Was I the only one expecting the girl from Split to reveal some ability at the end? 2)Were the powers meant to be psychological, because I'd assume Unbreakable Danny Dunn would otherwise be able to demonstrate his powers just by surviving a potentially injurious attack away from water. Nothing dangerous, just ask the doctor to draw blood while he isn't soaking wet as a test of his conviction that he is damage resistant. 3)How exactly did this organization not want to detain Dunn's kid, Elijah's mom or the girl at least long enough to determine if these three could cause any problems? You'd think after millennia of experience they'd be more thorough. Personally I prefer my superhumans to balance each other out with neither being bothered by conventional ****. Never cared for the secret organization of normals (military or otherwise) who somehow get on an even footing.

end of spoilers

[Nate Grey]

So this is a spoiler thread? Cool. Soooo gonna discuss big massive HUGE spoilers. No more warnings nor spoiler tags since, again, spoiler thread.









I actually saw this Thursday at 7pm. Wanted to take some time to think about it, which I guess means Night did his job? I think its better than Split (not a huge fan of the movie, more on that below, but I don't hate it), but not better than Unbreakable. The audience seemed to loooooooove Hedwig. "You're with Kevin now???" and the audience erupted in laughter.

I knew something was up when the doctor used and manipulated Kevin's DID instead of treat his DID which for any real doctor should be unethical. Not once did she suggest integration of Kevin's personalities. So I'm thinking "I couldn't have discovered the twist this early have I?" and I guess I did, but maybe it wasn't supposed to be hidden from the audience but rather to have the audience put together clues as to the doctor's true nature.

The real twist was Elijah's REAL plan, which I loved. And watching the doctor scream in defeat made it all worthwhile.

I guess the "They always underestimate the mastermind" line was only recorded for the commercial, or maybe its in a deleted scene that'll pop up on the blu-ray/DVD.

I'm disappointed in that this is all we'll ever get of David. I felt he didn't really have a chance to shine, and then he was killed by a no-name goon. I would have loved a "true" sequel where it was David vs some other bad guy (not Mr. Glass) the whole way through. Meanwhile we got plenty of Kevin throughout two movies and, I guess that's great for fans of the character and Split. Years of watching One Life to Live may have soured me on DID characters.

As for the organization...cliché a bit, but I did appreciate that the one cliché M. Knight seemed to avoid was the Black Clovers being seeded throughout all branches of the government like they were Hydra or something. No, they actually seem akin to a cult with no power within the government at all, hence the subterfuge of the doctor. This is why they had to use a government facility instead of their own black site somewhere. They don't have that kind of money nor pull, so they have to maintain this balance in secret. I also figured that's why she only had three days: whatever ruse she used to get the government or local law (or both?) to agree to in regards to Kevin Elijah and David was only good for three days as opposed to being indefinite.

To be clear, I'm sure Staple was a real doctor, none of this would have worked if she was a fake. What was fake was her so-called "treatment" that someone with juice agreed to, I'm guessing begrudgingly hence the "three day" time limit.

Also there seems to be no clear leadership and they were perhaps in disarray. Staple's idea was brand spanking new and the first time she had tried it. Which means IMO even though they have been around, did she say, 10,000 years?, it takes them a long time to met out any sort of balance and she was trying to find a more efficient and quicker way to do things. I got the impression she was an upstart whose idea was so good on paper that the group as a whole turned to her out of desperation. Her scream at the end wasn't just defeat: the whole point of the organization is to deal with heroes and villains without the public knowing said heroes and villains even exist. Thanks to her the public now knows heroes and villains do exist, and she's probably excommunicated. I'm not sure that means her life is forfeit, but if the group is that important to Ellie being excised from it might be worse than death to her. I'm thinking Night had Staple reveal this is the first time she tried this and that it appeared to work, and what Elijah had really done, happened back to back so audiences wouldn't miss this.

Finally: Mr. Glass himself. Very little of him in his own movie. He was doped up for half the movie, or at least pretending to be. But when he was himself, he shined. I loved how he gained the allegiance of Kevin, or rather some of Kevin's personalities. A whole movie of Elijah manipulating multiple people for some grand goal would have been awesome, but Night is a fan of less is more so this is what we got. David's death affected me more than his, but I still hated to see him go and I'm glad he got the last laugh. "But mama...this isn't a showdown...this is an origin story."

[Jim Kelly]

Just like UNBREAKABLE and SPLIT, the title GLASS doesn't have to refer to one specific character and can have multiple meanings. We immediately think of Mr. Glass, but there's lots of glass in the movie. Glass is a common metaphor in movies, because we are looking at things through a lens. And broken glass is a recurring idea in film. There's also the looking glass and when you go through it everything is turned around. A broken mirror gives mulitple reflections.

In these movies figuring out the twist is not a weakness. In fact, it's better to think ahead and see where the movie is heading, because then you can observe more of what's going on in the scenes besides the most obvious things. I knew there was something going on with Sarah Paulson's character--the way she paints her face with too much lipstick and make-up, she's wearing a mask--but I didn't figure it all out. But if I had, I would have been pleased, as I might have picked up more that was going on.

[Nate Grey]

#1 Movie, over 40m domestic and over 89m worldwide.

Moving on, Samuel L. Jackson reveals to Digital Spy: "There was a different ending when we first started this that kind of needed to be changed because of the way society is and what's going on in the world and what it would have looked like."

I wonder if that means the fight really was supposed to take place at the tower unveiling.

[Jim Kelly]

Setting up the tower battle was a way to distract the audience. The things that some critics seem to think are wrong with the movie are the things that draw attention. The big showdown, the set up of a tower battle, a few of the twists, the exposition. But these all serve to distract us and make us think in one direction, when the direction it really takes is ultimately another one.

If it had been a big budget CGI battle at the tower, it would have just satisfied the commonplace comic book tropes. By avoiding that, by going through the basement as it were, not only does M. Night give himself a smaller budget and a better chance of making back all his money, but he tells a more thoughtful story where the climax is much more cerebral and serves the idiosyncracies of his world.

It's more like a BLACK MIRROR episode in the end where the glass is the screen that everyone looks at, the black mirror of their devices that reveals the truth. Mr. Glass's super-power was always his mind and his command of technology--he accomplishes the real comic book twist that he always wanted, even if he had to die to achieve it. But then Mr. Glass's existence in that institution was worse than death for him.

[Nate Grey]

Since I actually want to talk about what Jackson said, I'll try this again.

Since he said the ending was changed "because of the way society is and what's going on in the world and what it would have looked like" what could that mean? Since the movie is still out (and #1) he can't go into detail so until he can let speculation run wild. I took it to Jackson's words to mean perhaps the tower fight was supposed to happen. Otherwise I have no idea and its fascinating to know this isn't what M. Knight originally envisioned as the ending. Did he mean martyrdom? That all three principal players were supposed to live? Then again come to find out M. Knight makes it a point to own the rights to most of his movies specifically to prevent other studios from making movies, and he always intended this to be the final movie with no hope for a third party to make a sequel or even spinoff...so that's out. So I'm back to all three were always supposed to die, just perhaps the circumstances of their deaths was changed "because of the way society is and what's going on in the world and what it would have looked like."

[Jim Kelly]

I think that M. Night probably has had many ideas for a sequel to UNBREAKABLE over the years. But as the landscape of comic book movies kept changing, his ideas changed. There was probably at some point an idea for a bigger budget movie that would have had a bigger fight and involved more locations. But to make that kind of movie, M. Night would have had to use other people's money and he wouldn't have had control over the final product.

So he made the kind of movie where he would have control. Whether the big budget movie would have taken place at a tower--we can't know. I think he just shows us that to suggest that this is where the movie is heading, so he can subvert our expectations. But if there really had been a big budget movie, then setting it at a train or airplane terminal would seem more in keeping with what's been established in the other movies. But then didn't a Marvel movie have a big showdown at an airplane terminal?

[Nate Grey]

I'm not sure budget was the issue. To be clear, I liked the subterfuge just fine, and since M. Knight is a smart man (IMO, since I know he has his detractors around here) I'd like to think that was always going to be the case. I'm just trying to reconcile Jackson's words here with the finished product.

I remember the folks behind Deadpool 2 (I want to say the director?) said they wanted to show more of Black Tom Cassidy's powers, but he argued it would look too much like Force powers plus it would go over budget. I bring this up to say if money was an issue or at least one of the issues people directly involved with the movie would say so. At least typically.

Here I took it to mean M. Knight wanted to make a cerebral movie that wasn't splashy, but he has to be current, what would have worked when Unbreakable came out might not work today. Perhaps he had an ending that was timely as he thought, but then took a look at the current landscape and decided it wasn't timely enough. What that could mean...won't find out till the special features on the blu-ray I guess, but now it would be interesting to watch again to try and guess.

[Jim Kelly]

I like how Shyamalan shows up in GLASS as a guy who says he used to hang around the stadium when he was younger and he did bad stuff, but he's reformed and doesn't do that kind of thing anymore. It calls back to UNBREAKABLE where he's a drug dealer at the stadium, but it can also be taken as meta--where he's talking about how he's changed and reformed as an artist.

[Midvillian1322]

Was this any good cause I liked the trailers but The critics have been hard on it and even Audience scores have been Medicore. Just curious what you guys think. Right now I'm leaning toward seeing the Upside over this tuesday.

[AnthonyO'Brien]

Wow, thanks for the replies folks!

Osaka tower was a great red herring. I *LIKE* that most of the movie is centered around the hospital and there was hardly any CGI in the end conflict.

yeah, you could see some of the plot twists coming but they were twists I wanted to see anyway.

[tabo61]

Wonder if the name of that secret society is the Cloverleaf?

[Jim Kelly]

Since I rewatched UNBREAKABLE and SPLIT the night before seeing GLASS, it's hard for me to council someone who hasn't seen those movies or hasn't seen them recently. It might be hard to track what's going on in GLASS, but then there is lots of exposition to help you through it. But what I liked was seeing moments, camera movements from the previous movies repeated in this one.

Also, UNBREAKABLE is really slow and hardly anything happens. Which isn't a bad thing to me--because it's a meditation--you sit with David Dunn's characters for a very long time. SPLIT is a bit faster pace, but it doesn't really go anywhere--it's another character study. So if critics saw both those movies, I don't understand why they would expect GLASS to be substantially different. It moves slowly, the characters don't go anywhere--it's like the other two movies.

I think it's significant that the cloverleaf has three leaves (not four, which would make it lucky), so if there's a name for the society then I think it would be the Black Three Leaf Clover. Although now that I think about it "I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover" has lyrics that apply to the three movies.

I'm looking over a four leaf clover
That I overlooked before
First is the sunshine, the second is rain
Third is the roses that bloom in the lane

There's no need explaining
The one remaining is somebody I adore
I'm looking over a four leaf clover
That I overlooked before.

The Black Three Leaf Clover want us to overlook the fourth leaf.