Sunday, February 19, 2017

Split: every tale needs a good old-fashioned hero

I saw Split last week and thoroughly enjoyed it, but was one of those people left confused by the ending. I knew I was missing something, I just didn't know what, so I was forced to turn to Google for answers as, having followed the film well enough, I was at a complete loss as to the meaning of the final scene.

[serious spoilers for Split below; seriously, if you haven't seen it but want to see it, do not read this because you'll hate me for life]

So I'm sitting in the cinema, Split is coming to its conclusion and I understand everything that has happened up to that point. I'm enjoying the plot and I haven't, to my own knowledge, missed anything major. The Beast (one of the 24 personalities inhabiting the mind of Kevin Wendell Crumb, played by James McAvoy) leaves the hideout of the Horde - made up of the Beast and three other personalities - having spared the life of Casey (played by Ana Taylor-Joy) because she is "pure".

But then the final scene begins and it's Bruce Willis - who hadn't been in the film at all - sitting in a café, telling some woman the terrorist whose name she is trying to think of but can't remember is called Mr. Glass. Then the credits roll and I'm sitting there like, "Who the fuck is Mr. Glass?! And where the hell did John McClane come from?!" I realised immediately I had been thoroughly robbed of an excitement more commonly associated with a reveal made in a Marvel post-credits scene.

I don't think I was alone in my puzzlement that night as I heard a couple of other movie-goers talking about the ending on their way out of the screen. I overheard one of them say the word "unbreakable" which I didn't immediately realise was the title of another movie until I looked up Mr. Glass online and learned that Unbreakable was a M. Night Shyamalan film released back in 2000 that I had never seen which starred Willis and Samuel L. Jackson.


When you realise Split is an Unbreakable spin-off but you have never seen Unbreakable so the cameo at the end makes no sense to you. Credit: filmracket.com.

Willis plays David Dunn - a security guard who discovers he has enhanced strength, stamina and invulnerability, as well as an extrasensory ability to see the crimes people have committed by touching them. Jackson, meanwhile, portrays Elijah Price, aka Mr. Glass - a man who suffers with Type 1 osteogenesis imperfecta, a disease which renders his bones extremely fragile, who believes that if he is the embodiment of human frailty then there must be somebody in the world who is the complete opposite of him, somebody unbreakable.

I tracked down a DVD copy of Unbreakable and watched it for the first time last night which only reinforced my feeling of being robbed at the end of Split. Even if somebody had told me to watch Unbreakable first, the impact of David Dunn's appearance at the end of Split on myself would have been mild compared to somebody who first saw and loved Unbreakable over 16 years ago.

While it may seem tenuous and forced to link the two films by throwing Dunn in at the end, Shyamalan revealed in recent interviews after Split was released that McAvoy's character Kevin Wendell Crumb (and each of the personalities wrought by the character's dissociative identity disorder) actually featured in his original script for Unbreakable, with some of the scenes from Split having been completely written back in 2000.

When asked by Entertainment Weekly at what point he decided to set the two movies in the same universe, Shyamalan revealed: 

"Oh, it was always there. Always. This character, Kevin from Split, was in the original script of Unbreakable. The original draft of Unbreakable focused on David Dunn and Elijah as his mentor. Elijah tells him, 'You’re a comic book character, go try it.' And instead of bumping into the Orange Suit Man, David bumps into one of Kevin’s personalities and goes to save the girls. So you’d have been watching the girls' side of it the whole time. That was the outline."


Bruce Willis as David Dunn in Unbreakable back in 2000. Over 16 years later, Dunn has seemingly been set on a collision course with The Beast/The Horde, played in Split by James McAvoy. Credit: pinterest.com.

It's a really interesting interview as he goes on to talk about how deliberate the process of including the cameo was and about how he left it out when first testing screening Split for fear of the Unbreakable link being leaked to the media. "But on top of that," Shyamalan added in the interview with EW, "I wanted it to win as its own movie. You like Split as its own movie? Well, guess what? You weren’t even watching what you thought you were."


Having watched both films as psychological thrillers only to realise that they are, in essence, comic book movies that have set up a titanic clash between a hero and a villain, I cannot wait to see how Shyamalan pits David Dunn and The Beast/The Horde against each other, not to mention the fact that Mr. Glass is bound to be involved in some manner too - all assuming another film in what has suddenly become another franchise for the super hero genre gets made, of course.

When asked by EW previously about an Unbreakable sequel, Samuel L. Jackson replied: "Night’s still around. Bruce is still around. I’m still around. And I’d love to break out of the asylum." I can imagine Shyamalan utilizing elements of his original draft for Unbreakable, with Mr. Glass, now perhaps remorseful for his past crimes, acting as a mentor to Dunn in his encounter with The Beast/The Horde. 


If Samuel L. Jackson is to reprise his role as Mr. Glass in a future film, he must bring the hair back. Credit: inverse.com.

Shyamalan has said that he has "a really robust outline, which is pretty intricate" already written for a follow-up movie, but that now his standards need to be higher. "I need to know I've won already," the director told EW, "I'm almost there but I'm not quite there." Having taken just over 16 years to follow up on Unbreakable with Split, hopefully he gets there a little quicker this time.

In any case, I am now better prepared for the next time I find myself sitting in a cinema watching a Shyamalan-directed movie, just on the off-chance it does turn out to be another secret sequel.

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