Unbreakable (2000) ✦ Member of the Month Winner: Full-Length Watchalong Reaction
Added 2024-07-07 03:15:01 +0000 UTCA new trilogy has begun. 👀 Thank you to everyone who voted for this in the Member of the Month poll last month! And thanks to JonJohns for picking this in the first place!
I broke a rule of mine and did some minor digging on this movie prior to watching it. Not enough to spoil myself on the story at all, but enough to understand that this movie isn't a stand-alone film. Yes, I will be watching Split and Glass as well to complete the trilogy.
I'm looking forward to discussing this! [Direct link here.]
Cheers,
✦ KL
Comments
NO SPOILERS, AND PLEASE DON'T SPOIL BY RESPONDING TO MY THOUGHTS BELOW: Hi! So, I haven't yet seen "Split" and "Glass," so you can rest assured that there are no spoilers coming. I haven't been reading the comments on this reaction because you mentioned people mentioning spoilers, and I don't want to have either movie spoiled for me either. I may have mentioned before, but I was introduced to M. Night. Shyamalan in the form of a marathon. I saw a certain movie (I won't say which because I know you don't like expectation spoilers either), and I loved it SO much that I couldn't stop raving about it. My dad decided after an hour of me blabbing about the movie I'd seen to show me the other three he had in his collection at the time. Personally, I liked them all. I may have suggested some on your suggestions form. I can't remember. I don't know how this movie would spoil any of the other movies. I don't want to read the comments to find out for fear of spoilers, but I guess I'll figure it out later when I watch more of them. I'm just not sure how anything in the first part of a trilogy could spoil anything else in the trilogy. I mean, the first part is SUPPOSED to set up events for future parts of the trilogy, right? I'm very confused at the moment. I do look forward to finding out more in the other parts of the series. I'll be doing my first watch of "Split" and "Glass" right along with you. Assuming I can ever find our copy of "Split." We have digital copies of "Unbreakable" and "Glass," but for some reason we have a hard copy of "Split." When my dad gets home I'll ask him where it is. We just reorganized my dad's DVD/Blu-Ray collection recently to find "Pump Up the Volume," so if anything we're missing was in the house, we would have found it. I have to assume one of my uncles borrowed it. One final note: If you're a fan of shows that take familiar concepts like superheroes or aliens or whatever and present them in a different way like this one did, you may want to check out Season One of "Heroes." It also had a different sort of vibe for the subject it tackled. POSSIBLE SUPER-MINOR SPOILER FOLLOWS? There are four seasons of "Heroes", but you wouldn't have to commit to watching it all. The first season (25 episodes I think?) stands on its own pretty well. I hope you don't consider that a spoiler. It doesn't give away anything about the content or anything.
BubblyRainbows
2024-07-15 23:33:38 +0000 UTCGreat reaction as usual. Man I was late to the party on this post, it slipped past me lol. I really enjoy this trilogy, and look forward to the other reactions.
Blkm44
2024-07-14 17:54:55 +0000 UTCThank you to everyone who voted for this! It made for a great reaction, even if you;re not a fan of this movie, you'll be a fan of this reaction :wink:
Jon Johns
2024-07-14 15:56:34 +0000 UTCThere was a LONG period of time when you were pretty silent, KL, The whole series of David going into the house to rescue the family, I had to consciously look at your screen to see if the video was frozen, or if you were muted LOL. One thing I'd want you to look at carefully, is the reveal of the mom tied to the radiator, when David enters the upstairs room. The Curtains blowing, revealing different parts of the scene. You are right, the cinematography is exceptional in this film.
Jon Johns
2024-07-14 15:50:08 +0000 UTCSo, yeah, I added this to my short list for the poll because of it's connections to the "Super Hero" or Comic Hero genre. This film, along with a few others are like, the "Anti-comic Comic-book movies" but also, because I think it will get you views :wink:
Jon Johns
2024-07-14 15:47:58 +0000 UTCIMO, this is M. Night's finest movie. I know his style isn't for everyone. But this one had very few flaws. There wasn't a lot of expression from Bruce, but you could see it under the surface. He looks like someone with depression. Just going through motions. Unbearable sadness to the point where you feel almost nothing. I connect with that feeling that life just isn't right. It's horrible. Luckily I don't feel that way myself anymore. The acting overall was pretty great. I always cringe during the kitchen scene with the gun. But thinking about it, it is a little kid way to think and do. Though he seems a bit old at this point. M. Night's movies are sometimes a miss from a plot standpoint, but his film-making is top-notch. You can really appreciate the care and study of each shot. He's very deliberate with everything. I always enjoy watching his films even if the story isn't great. There's only one that I've seen that I regret, and that one is widely considered his worst anyway. He also made a straight-up horror flick I haven't seen because that's just not my jam. Some of them though are still great. This trilogy being amongst them. Can't wait for more!
Marty McGee
2024-07-13 21:37:55 +0000 UTCI remember the trailer for this movie was just that scene with David talking to the doctor after the train crash and he was asking him all those questions as the camera is, like, a room away slowly moving closer to David and you see the body of the other survivor on the table in front of him and see the breathing getting labored and blood starting to soak the sheet covering it. It was just that scene, straight up, no cuts and just ends with the line, "And 2. you didn't break one bone. You don't have a scratch on you." Then it's just a black screen with glass shattering on it with the title. I was SO hyped and was like, "WHAT?? I don't know WHAT that's about, but I am SO there!" When they had the opening about comic books, I was like "Waitaminute, is the premise about comic books?? Oh man," 'cause as a comic book reader (along with my friend who went with me and worked in a comic book shop), neither of us had any idea. I remember LOVING it ('cause of how they represented the possibility in such a real world way AND it was my theory I had growing up), but I seem to feel that my friend did not, but it was always hard for me to predict what he was going to like. The website, before the movie came out, was cool also. It posited the question, "Are you unbreakable?" and they'd have all these true amazing stories of people that survived crazy situations.
Thadman
2024-07-10 12:00:54 +0000 UTCI'd gotten the DVD right when it came out and watched the deleted scenes/extended scenes and if I remember correctly, there weren't a TON of them and they were pretty short, so I assumed most were cut for time sake, but the one that sticks in my mind that I wish they'd left in was, I believe, right after David and family get home after the crash and he tells her that he didn't think he got the security job in NY and he goes upstairs and she goes into her room. The next scene was the bathroom and the shower going and the camera goes into the shower, past the curtain, and David is in there curled in a ball, shaking and almost hyperventilating. Gravity of what he'd been through just came all out. It wasn't a long scene, but I thought it was great to see how freaked out he was afterwards, understandably.
Thadman
2024-07-10 11:47:20 +0000 UTCMy friend and I were M. Night fans at the time and I loved "The Sixth Sense," "Unbreakable" "Signs" and we both loved "The Village" even though people were kinda crapping on it. I also really liked "The Lady in the Water," but I can see how that one would not be for everyone. I liked his style and appreciated bringing it to different sort of genres. I feel that after "The Sixth Sense," people were likening him to Hitchcock (which he was a big fan of, doing cameos in his films) and had certain expectations of his films and they'd throw the whole movie out when it didn't have the "signature" reveal or whatever. I'd heard a LOT of people at the time judging his movies on how good/shocking the end was/were and I'm like, "What about the rest of the movie?" That being said, I can explain why I didn't like The Happening (although I loved the premise) and The Last Airbender (because I'm a huge fan of the original animation), but I won't go into details since KL hasn't seen them. I did not watch TLA until many years later 'cause it bombed so bad and I loved the original so much, I stayed away. It was years after my most recent rewatch of the series, so I had enough distance from it that I wouldn't get as angry about it and be able to just critique why it didn't work. Never saw "After Earth" 'cause it was panned as much as TLA, so I stayed away. I haven't seen his newer movies, except "Split" and "Glass" but I hear he made a good suspense thriller/horror movie called "Devil". Wanted to see it 'cause the trailer had me intrigued. I just never got around to it. I can't remember if he wrote that and didn't direct it or if he directed it and didn't write it. One of those two. But, that was before "Split" I'm pretty sure, and it marked the first movie that he got good reviews for in a while and, I feel, started his comeback. I saw the trailer for "Old" and that actually really disturbed me that I didn't want to see it.😁
Thadman
2024-07-10 11:37:18 +0000 UTCExcellent reaction…hadn’t seen this movie all the way through in over a decade. Excited for Split next!
HugoBoss435
2024-07-09 14:21:06 +0000 UTCone of my favorite early 2000s movie so good I watch it every chance I get. I do like for most superheros name Bruce Willis character first and last name start with the same letter. Samuel L. Jackson was incredible in this role. excited for the next reaction
Ronix
2024-07-08 01:29:59 +0000 UTCI love the small little themes at play. Knowing your place in the world. How David is sad because he's not doing what he's supposed to be doing is comment on depression. Also how, like when Robin Wright's character commented on Elijah, some people get broken so much that their mind gets broken too. Such a great look at trauma and how it manifests in people. Which I think is also how David and Elijah are different. Elijah remembers every break whereas David doesn't remember almost drowning, the car accident, and never being sick. It's almost like his mind can't be broken either. So his defense mechanism is to forget.
Carl Johnson
2024-07-08 00:07:47 +0000 UTCI wrote a paper on this film and one of the things I commented on is how this whole movie plays out like the first act of a typical superhero movie. I compared how the first act of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man was essentially this whole film.
Carl Johnson
2024-07-08 00:02:19 +0000 UTCVery cool. This is my personal favorite of M. Knight Shyamalan's movies. I absolutely love both Bruce Willis and Samuel Jackson in this (and Robin Wright, too). Everyone gives such controlled, restrained performances. In fact, the whole movie is incredibly restrained, and quiet. But it bleeds pure, raw emotion throughout. I also love how Shyamalan frames most of the movie, always locked in by architecture or landscape, to appear as if trapped within a comic book frame. And the extremely stripped-down realistic nature of the final act with David (David Dunn...like Peter Parker, or Clark Kent) finally becoming a hero, is one of my favorite super hero scenes I think in all of cinema...and I'm a huge comic nerd.
Steve Mercier
2024-07-07 15:07:36 +0000 UTCLooking forward to finally watching this movie all the way thru 😆 This is one films where I know everything about it and have seen its sequels many times. I’ve just never actually watched Unbreakable in it’s entirety from start to finish 🤦♀️ I loved the sequels for reasons we will get into when the time comes…🤐😉🤐
CheshireKat528
2024-07-07 14:38:19 +0000 UTCGlad I got to see this movie for the first time. But now I wish I had seen this movie earlier. I personally like it more than The Sixth Sense.
Yoshi1990
2024-07-07 09:37:24 +0000 UTCSo glad you got to experience this. Shyamalan gets a lot of crap from his haters, but there's something about his filmmaking that always feels so grounded, no matter how fantastical the subject matter might be. Can't wait to see your reactions to the other two films in this series sometime in the future.
Nestor Custodio
2024-07-07 08:06:44 +0000 UTCI think its wild just how many 3-4 minute scenes we get, one single take, but it has such dynamic character dialogue and dynamic camera movement. Between "action" and "cut", characters have learned something new about each other; cameras have zoomed in or out or threaded between train seats; the blocking and choreography of the extras that make up a crowd...
Richard Flores
2024-07-07 06:25:41 +0000 UTCI don't know how much of this you'd be aware of coming to it all now, but with the exception of Superman (1978) and Batman (1989), both of which are part of series that were considered to have declined greatly in quality over the course of their runs, there were enough unsuccessful, poorly-conceived, or outright unfinished comic book movies between 1978 and 1999 that the genre was vaguely considered to be box office poison and a big risk. I think at the time there was a widespread sense that there was a limit to how much of a comic book could be translated to the screen without coming off as silly (and both Superman and Batman have their silly moments). X-Men in 2000 was the first sign that maybe comic book movies could be popular, and Spider-Man in 2002 proved that they could not only be a success but that they could be a blockbuster success (and even then it still took another 6 years before the MCU came along and really blew things up). So, I think the unique approach to this movie was Shyamalan's attempt to figure out how to do something with comic books in an industry that was fearful of them: a grounded approach that downplayed stuff like tights and magical powers. Unfortunately for Shyamalan, Unbreakable opened only a few months after X-Men in 2000, and it was also his highly-anticipated follow-up to the cultural phenomenon that was The Sixth Sense. I love The Sixth Sense, and I know you haven't seen it yet, but I definitely think that while you can tell the films are from the same filmmaker from the style, there is no question that the movies are much different in tone. The Sixth Sense is very emotional, whereas Unbreakable is moody and dark. Audiences coming off of the emotion of The Sixth Sense (which obviously I won't go into detail about) and the summer popcorn thrills of X-Men were then dropped into a fairly bleak movie with a downer ending like Unbreakable, and while the movie was successful (about $250m), it was significantly less successful than The Sixth Sense (about $675m), and after Signs rebounded to $400m, there was a period where Unbreakable was considered a bit of a red-headed stepchild. That said, if we're talking about Shyamalan's filmography, there's actually quite a few that even those who love The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and some of his more recent work would encourage you to skip. The Sixth Sense was such a smash that Shyamalan was compared to the next Spielberg. By his own accounts, his ego got a little inflated by everything, and as quickly as The Village (2004), the film he made after Signs, audiences were starting to turn on him. The four films he made after The Village (which is debated, but probably worth checking out) -- Lady in the Water (2006), The Happening (2008), The Last Airbender (2010), and After Earth (2013) -- were widely hated by both critics and the public, with The Last Airbender in particular, a live-action version of a popular Nickelodeon cartoon, being considered one of the worst TV-to-film adaptations ever made. That said, after the failure of After Earth, Shyamalan went away and came back with an extremely small independent movie called The Visit, and since then he seems to have regained his touch, and without the ego that he had when he was younger, either. His upcoming movie Trap (2024) looks very interesting. Personally, as much as I want to see what you think of the rest of the trilogy (it's just a shame you couldn't have gone in completely blind, you'll see what I mean when you watch the movie), I also wouldn't mind if you got The Sixth Sense in, without necessarily waiting until October.
Tyler Foster
2024-07-07 06:21:37 +0000 UTCOne of the interesting points about this movie is that it came out before the recent trend of super-hero movies. Before MCU, DCU, Dark Knights, Spider-man movies, etc. I loved it at the time (partially because i collected comics), but it might play better now than it did then. The tropes of super-hero stories are more common knowledge now. So, things like the origin story, the security guard uniform/cape, the villainous name "Mr. Glass," are more familiar to people when it comes together at the end.
Joe
2024-07-07 06:05:06 +0000 UTCIt's such a unique twist on the superhero genre, if you can call that a genre. Glad to see you got hooked into the story. I think the characters are so grounded and relatable, especially David's family dynamic. I get emotional every time I watch the scene where she asks if he's been with anyone. As far as music goes, Shyamalan doesn't feel an obligation to it. If the score isn't working with a scene, you can bet he's gonna leave the music out of that scene. It's one of the elements that makes up his unique style. Looking forward to seeing what you think about his other films.
Chad Jenkins
2024-07-07 05:41:13 +0000 UTCInterestingly also, the hypothesis in "Split" was something else I'd thought about as a kid.
Thadman
2024-07-07 05:28:57 +0000 UTCThat said, I kind of thought it was inevitable anyway, so, the worst thing that happened was that this was true.
Tyler Foster
2024-07-07 04:21:54 +0000 UTCHaha, whoops. That *was* the spoiler I was hoping to avoid: that this is the first of a trilogy. You see how it's especially tricky: many people are going to mention this almost reflexively, even though it's technically a surprise, and then if the surprise is intact, how do you convince someone to watch the next movie next without revealing that?
Tyler Foster
2024-07-07 04:20:30 +0000 UTCSplit is pretty great, top-notch acting and another variation on a theme / genre.
Jon Johns
2024-07-07 03:25:00 +0000 UTCI was just thinking about this movie today, as a possible recommendation for Cristy 😃❤️
Michael Norman
2024-07-07 03:24:49 +0000 UTC
