Glass (Cristal)

El señor Shymalan se ha divertió mucho con esto. Trabajando a conciencia con el potencial dramático de los tres personajes principales y sus relaciones de profundización/acercamiento dentro de la misma casa, se gradúa y entretiene explorando y revelando la esencia de un tema brillante, que creó hace 19 años y construyó hace tres (la idea mágica de que los héroes de los cómics están presentes en la realidad). Lo hace con su típico deleite de creatividad visual, referencias temáticas y, en el final, dos puntos culminantes. Pero a pesar de que todo encaja en el primer punto, y se vuelve debidamente conspirador y original y atrevido en relación con las expectativas del espectador, no estoy del todo seguro de haberlo querido así. Por no hablar del segundo punto, que no debería haber estado ahí en absoluto, porque la película no está construida para ello. (20.01.2019)

Well… Given that I was mentally prepared for the worst, I’m not disappointed. In fact, I’m relatively a tiny bit pleasantly surprised that, at least conceptually, it makes some sense. IMHO, it is well though-out. In Glass, Shyalaman explores a well known but slightly different motif of comics films - how it would be in the real world - without the viewer actually anticipating it until de last moment. For the closure of a trilogy, it makes sense overall. Unfortunately, the film is almost impossible to enjoy purely at the level of the viewer, but only after it finishes, if you are able and willing to appreciate its structure. There are several stupid moments that ruin what could be a pleasant experience, along with empty dialogues and inconsistent performances (I like Sarah Paulson, but here she was badly cast). What’s utter nonsense is the character of Taylor-Joy (what she’s forced to do there is unbelievable), as well as the final alliance of some of the characters. (13.02.2019)

I understand where the director was going with all of this. Unfortunately, I don’t really get how he filmed it. While  Unbreakable is a fundamental movie of American cinema in my eyes, and Split set out to be the same, Glass connected the stories of all participants in a way that was not only unnecessary but it also spoiled my impression of the two previous films, which ended perfectly… and should have remained that way. But M. Night Shyamalan turned his superheroes into such strange figures that even though I still liked James McAvoy’s unrestrained acting, the movie as a whole made me really unhappy. It felt like a complete mess. But it’s still Shyamalan, so if you can endure the boring madhouse-like middle of the move, the finale can be quite intriguing from a screenwriting perspective. You certainly have to give him that. (14.06.2019)

M. Night Shyamalan goes back to his roots and disappoints badly. In everything. Glass is a film that will probably make you a little embarrassed for the filmmaker himself. It looks televisual, but above all it's all incredibly stupid and self-aware at the same time. The twists and turns are absurd, the pacing is awfully slow and any attempts at philosophising are inhumanly off, and the decent Bruce Willis and James McAvoy can't pull it up to average. Watching Glass is like watching M. Night Shyamalan destroy his own legacy for two hours. And it's not a pretty sight. (16.01.2019)

With the themes, the involvement of the three, Paulson's role in the action, and the plot arc (across the episodes as a whole, not just this one), this is undeniably an interesting yet logical culmination of the trilogy, and one that works particularly well on a meta level, as since Unbreakable, we are now in the "cinematic age of the superhero". That's exactly how it works in the fist hour, and with that in mind, it goes down some interesting paths where Shyamalan isn't afraid to toy with expectations. The problem, and quite a major one, is the second half, when it doesn't so much shift in place as shuffle backwards on a square inch. It unfolds hastily in scenes where you always know safely in advance what is going to happen and how it is going to happen and where it is going, so that sometimes you wait for tens of minutes before it finally happens and then it is explained to you at length. Even the potentially powerful "whispering to the trio" scenes are stripped down and not for a moment convincing. This is doubly disappointing, because the second half pretends "as if the whispering worked and made the people in question angry", which no one, thanks to the unconvincing delivery, can believe for a second. On paper, it all might have made sense to Shyamalan and seemed on the level of Unbreakable, but the execution stalls, and despite a solid pacing and a supportive overall plane, the crappy second half sinks it cruelly. It's not bad, it's not unintentionally funny, it's just very good at first before it becomes very boring. (07.02.2021)

The biggest flop of the year? Quite possibly. I saw the film in the cinema two weeks ago and it smoked out of my head so quickly that I'm only writing about it now, and that doesn't bode damn well. I don't know if Shyamalan has family problems, is drowning in debt or has turned to drugs because after The Visit and Split it looked like he was back to where we wanted him to be, but now he's plummeting down again and has made perhaps the most boring film I've ever seen in the cinema. The acting aces did not please at all. James McAvoy overacts horribly and is not interesting at all, Bruce Willis is a clear candidate to the Golden Raspberry and Samuel L. Jackson unfortunately didn't say much. The film offers almost nothing. It's not action, horror, thriller, funny or suspenseful. It fits the drama, but it's properly tedious, visually unappealing and strangely overwrought at the end. A strange, uninteresting and unentertaining film and I hate that wholeheartedly. I felt like I went to a restaurant and ordered a beef steak medium well with mushrooms, asparagus and chips and ended up getting a steak well done with roast potatoes, carrots and salad. This is not how I imagined my first cinema visit this year. 30% (08.02.2019)

This era calls for a strong stance against movies that divide the audience, and rather than beginning to accommodate such cases, it is easier to start laughing at them. Glass,  just like The Sixth Sense was in its time, is a film for patient viewers, but it doesn't suit today's trends too well. M. Night Shyamalan brings back that slow pacing and uniqueness, and while most of the running time promises a new generation of comic books, in the end, it brings the opposite, with an anti-comic-book whose finale kicks even the slightly sympathetic viewer directly in the tenders. With the help of perfectly used flashbacks, I have to admit that I simply wasn't prepared for some points, and although I don't think everything was planned like this twenty years ago, I would believe that what the creator carried in his head for years as a continuation of the Unbreakable relationship between David and Elijah should have looked just like this, and Kevin served as the ideal trigger for it. There is no room for digressions here, so I have to smirk at the complaints about the sequels or spin-offs we are now supposed to expect. They'll never come, and they shouldn't. Everything has been said, to the very last drop. And I'm giving it the highest rating, even though I'm not sure I can ever come back here again, and even though everything inside me was hurting when I left the cinema. (24.01.2019)

McAvoy and Willis are outstanding, as they finally have some good roles after a long time. Samuel L. Jackson doesn't take any chances, but he is surprisingly pushed into the background. Glass picks up nicely where we left off twenty years ago. Yes, times have changed since Unbreakable and maybe we don’t need another movie like that. But still it makes for a pleasant and down-to-earth contrast to today’s comic-book blockbusters. It works as it should, but it just lacks anything shocking after all of the X-Men movies. Even so, Shy offers solid and quite surprising twists. This had to have been an unpleasant surprise for those who have only seen Split, but not Unbreakable. They wouldn't be able to make heads or tails out of it. (20.01.2019)

Shyamalan played with his child, for sure, but it’s hard to deny that it lacks the mystery of the “first part” and the surprise of the “second part”. The imaginary highlight of this rather chatty but well-written film is the conversation of all three protagonists in the pink cell of the psychiatric hospital. After that, you just count how many times The Beast will be on the scene and how many security guards he'll beat up. James McAvoy is superb in his role and it's worth going to the cinema for him alone, to see his performance on the big screen. (27.01.2019)

The idea itself isn't bad, but its execution is, as with Split, mostly inadvertently ridiculous. I liked that the film wanted to work with comic stereotypes as much as the (great) Unbreakable, that unlike the previous picture it wasn't just a solo by the overacting James McAvoy and that I saw Bruce Willis in the movie theatre again. But there was still something grinding about it. Primarily in the prison... And then in front of it. Well, the introduction did look quite promising. (22.01.2019)

I won’t deny that Glass is a problematic film, many viewers have trouble finding a way through the unprecedented stance between an origin story and a genre archetype that transforms popular templates in order to build its own unique world. But it still surprises me how critical the audience has been, because below the subversion of an easygoing experience lies a film that is great and conceptually coherent. They say that the beginning is boring, but it’s not, by freely following on the previous films and showing the protagonists in action, Shyalaman is not only appealing to nostalgia, but also restores the positions on the chessboard, catering to the viewers that don’t remember much of Unbreakable and Split. They say that the part in the clinic is stupid and I don’t understand why. The director found an ideal setting to develop and explain the relationships between the three protagonists, while reinforcing the tightness of the narrative, both internally, through the super-hero plots that motivate the characters, and externally, with a story in the shape of an escape game, or the process to reach a higher and gradually changing goal. The two endings not only culminate the physical clash of the characters (the scene on the parking lot), but also show what their clash meant to the surrounding world, which up until then had a passive, secondary position in the eyes of the protagonists, who considered themselves superior, or at least the viewer did (the station). The film perhaps ends in an unexpected albeit understandable way vis-a-vis its predecessors and its own scale, because, notwithstanding the pedant attention to detail and the constantly expanding universe, everything in it is set up so even those who haven’t watched the previous films would understand it – and maybe herein lies the problem and the reason why so many fans of Unbreakable refuse to accept it. The experience is reinforced by the beating soundtrack, McAvoy’s devilish performance, the excellent editing and the flashbacks that explain each of the twists in order to keep the curiosity and the tension. Personally, only a few details bothered me, among which are one massive screenwriting fail that I can’t ignore, the visual cheapness of some sequences, and mainly the escape itself, which feels quite dodgy, but those are perhaps things that are part of a remarkable film. 80% (24.01.2019)

M. Al principio, me gustó el desarrollo de los personajes padre e hijo de El protegido y su colaboración fue algo que me hubiera gustado ver durante el resto de la película. Por desgracia, una vez que la acción se traslada al hospital psiquiátrico, no es más que una oleada de conversaciones siniestras y la preparación de un final idiota. Me parece que Shyamalan ha querido subirse a la ola actual del cómic y a la vez manosearla con su estilo personal. El desenlace de esta película es una bofetada tanto a los espectadores de las películas de cómic como a los fans directos de El protegido, no creo que ninguno de ellos quisiera esto. De alguna manera, creo que es mejor quedarse con el cameo de Willis en Múltiple. (07.04.2019)

Watching Glass before Unbreakable and Split was a really stupid idea. In his latest film, M. Night Shyamalan hosts a sort of school reunion of old friends after all these years: Mr. Glass as the demonic and erratic principal, Mr. Unbreakable as a nearly invulnerable janitor who is only terrified of cleaning swimming pools, and Mr. Split as an unstable young man whose personality could take a whole class of students. I liked that the supporting characters from the previous films returned, giving the conclusion of the trilogy both a nostalgic punch (even though the second film is less than three years old) and coherence. The individual plot pieces of the puzzle from the first and second films slowly began to fit together and, oddly enough, it all worked. The character of the overly rational doctor denying the supernatural contrasted well with the extraordinary trio of patients at the sanitarium. The ending was both painful and a shame; in the first case because of the fate of the main characters, in the second case because of the somewhat far-fetched denouement around the doctor's character, which was surprising at first but slightly out of place. All in all, this is a solidly handled conclusion to a trilogy about extraordinary people that could have been filmed a little differently, but I was still satisfied with the final product. (20.01.2019)

Nigga wut!? It's the same situation as Besson's Lucy. But at least that one had form, action, and the kind of unbridled depravity where you know it might not make sense in general, but it certainly makes sense in the director's head. Glass doesn't have the budget or the attractions, but it does have Shyamalan's total tunnel vision for the purpose of ironically commenting on the superhero genre and becoming once again a big, relevant director whose mirror can cut. Into the shadow of this goal, then, must fall all the little individual details. I haven't heard such terrible dialogue in years. Terribly written characters stay in one place for most of the time, waiting for the camera to cut to them so they can say an important line. The ending then dives into sheer monologism, where they've definitely resigned themselves to closing the story in any way other than by having a character go from individual to individual and just telling them things that need to be said until we end up slap ourselves on the forehead. Which I've been doing since about halfway through, so my head was hurting. People who go "oh wow!" at the end of Saw VII might nevertheless be thrilled. (23.01.2019)