All great directors have an optimal working arc and a phase in which their films are received with interest for the name they have forged, regardless of their relevance. ‘Weather’ M. Night Shyamalan is one of those early twilight movies that show a teacher working in a sum of conditions that are not what he used to, achieving results far from his best days, but not negligible.
Careers like John Carpenter’s are now viewed as a success story, but after failing with his best film at the box office, he had even in the 1980s work on much tighter budgets. After his disaster trio of ‘The Incident’, ‘Airbender the Last Warrior’ and ‘After Earth’, Shyamalan was saved by Blumhouse and his ability to work out ideas on a budget, so this ‘Old’ is part of a contract of Pyrrhic thrillers (18 million) earned after his new resurrection of jobs without too much risk to the studios.
A comic book adaptation with sunstroke
A comfortable space for the director, who finds relative freedom to continue perpetuating his style without the need to seek to ride current genre waves that do not just hit him or need them. ‘Tiempo’ adapts a graphic novel that Shyamalan decides to reinterpret in his own way, rewriting the most enigmatic parts to take the story to its terrain of a science fiction of ambivalent explanations, in which science is almost a supernatural element on which it serves to rely to explain the most conflictive developments of the improbable.
A movement that is not due so much to a lack of elegance as an authorial obsession that swings around the idea of the supernatural according to the series ‘The Twilight Zone’, which reached the metaphysical through an almost alchemical science which in many cases follows its own logic that more than science is fantasy-fiction created for skeptics, but which is today more naive and endearing in light of the new barriers that have been placed on that magic attributed to mineral substances, black holes and other “why not” logics.
In fact, there was a television series that tried to stretch the limits of science to achieve Unpack every possible horror and fantasy subgenre with a very 90s internal logic. ‘The X-Files’ tried to present the impossible as certainly possible, as an antidote to horror series and movies that presented their supernatural elements without questioning whether that needed a more or less empirically verifiable basis.
In search of plausible magic-fiction
Today the most serious episodes of the Chris Carter series are the most endearing for his effort to make the impossible plausible and that style is the one with which Shyamalan has played throughout his filmography, being the case of ‘Tiempo’ the most evident, already that, beyond the inspiration in ‘Sandcastle’, the whole episode seems like a familiar reimagining of the ‘Dod Kalm’ episode of ‘The X-Files’. True to himself, the creator of ‘The Incident’ handles tone with ease, without indulging in too many self-indulgent ramblings and sticking to the four elements on which he builds his narrative.
Three families, an aging beach and a greater mystery. Why are they there? For most of the time these factors are balanced in a self-contained tale in the style of Stephen King’s ‘The Raft’. Sometimes the particularity of the effects of aging creates a feeling of disorientation in which the space in which the tragedy takes place takes center stage. At its best, ‘Time’ comes close to being an existential nightmare within a strange place in the style of ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ or a feverish tale by Junji Ito.
There is a master development in the arrangement of the elements. Camera movements from one place to another that emulate the remote experience of not knowing what is happening within a few meters that we have all experienced. But nevertheless, the arthouse film struggling to get ahead is held back by two factors. The first is the proposal of seeing everything from the eyes of a third party, a rapper on the beach who seems to be our eyes from one place to another on the beach. There the resource of horizontal sweeps (his gaze, ours), ends up being repetitive.
A first draft script
Shyamalan abuses panning because the text is full of surprises and revelations, associated with the effects that we are seeing, making the set an entertaining carousel of ideas with quite a sly humor –that express pregnancy– and images of impact, but let it be more typical of a fair booth than a work of greater aspirations. The second factor is his script full of speculations and previous explanations that break the ethereal illusion of a surreal nightmare by Hiroshi Teshigahara.
The need to turn is not something that should surprise us today in Shyamalan’s cinema, but this time, although it is satisfactory, it gives a feeling of last-minute need, not to dare to round off his film with mysteries. In addition, he has some points in common with his latest recent work that begin to seem like a recurring obsession, although the most serious thing is that it seems that he cannot resist giving clues in the mouths of his characters, with some literal phrases in his mouth that seem show the end before time in a gratuitous speculations that do not hold up at the time they manifest.
This vice of verbalizing too much in ‘Time’ is accompanied by some ticks of incomprehensible humor brand of the house, from the rapper who claims that his name is ‘Mid-Sized Sedan’ or talks about the swimming styles of his flirt as if that had relevance in moments when we are to something else, to the little misogynistic leaves Already recurring in his cinema in the form without any elegance in which he tries to ridicule a character who did not need to be specified other than with the detail of the mobile as Abby Lee.
An anomaly in the commercial landscape, but not so much
Fortunately, his lack of subtlety in the script – it may be a good time in his career to let himself be wired by people who write well – does not lead here to the inadvertent comedy disaster of ‘The Incident’ and his ability to place the action turns out to be always entertaining, with some remarkable staging details and not very available to anyone, also managing to build a rare, infrequent and hallucinated tone that is no longer usual to see in works premiered on the big screen.
‘Tiempo’ is not a major work by the director of ‘Signs’, but it is effective enough to achieve good box office numbers in the strangest summer that cinema has lived since its existence, but today we are in the richest time in new voices and fantastic cinema of large and small scale – which in many cases do not reach theaters or platforms – to make the wave of surnames for the fact of being and It is necessary to make impartial judgments to works that could give more of themselves, while new talents are lost in the bottom of catalogs with hardly any publicity.
A competent Shyamalan may be enough to make ‘Tiempo’ a summery premiere that deserves our attention, but behind ‘Glass’ there was hope that the author would catch the current wave of fantastic with a less anachronistic and nostalgic conviction of his latest revelations. hour and his little intuition for humor, with more self-confidence in that hidden, experimental, no-holds-barred movie that reveals his cinephile good taste and his classicism with almost no outbursts of special effects. On his kind reflection on old age, death, love and family, there is really nothing that he did not raise in the delicate look at the intergenerational transcendence of ‘The sixth sense’, more than two decades ago.