Unbreakable (film).html



Unbreakable
Directed by	M. Night Shyamalan
Produced by	Barry Mendel Sam Mercer M. Night Shyamalan
Written by	M. Night Shyamalan
Starring	Bruce Willis Samuel L. Jackson Robin Wright Penn Spencer Treat Clark Charlayne Woodard
Music by	James Newton Howard
Editing by	Dylan Tichenor
Distributed by	Touchstone Pictures
Release date(s)	November 22, 2000
Running time	107 min.
Language	English
Gross revenue	$248,118,121

Unbreakable is a 2000 film written, produced and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, starring Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. The movie was inspired by the world of comic books and its interest in exploring mythic dimensions of the real world.

Plot

Elijah Price (Jackson) is born with Type I osteogenesis imperfecta, a rare disease in which the bones break easily. As a child he is taunted by other children, who nickname him "Mr. Glass". Drawing on what he has read in comic books during his many hospital stays, Price theorizes that if he is frail at one extreme, then perhaps there is someone strong at the opposite extreme.

Security guard David Dunn (Willis) is also searching for a meaning to his life. He gave up a promising football career to marry Audrey, the girl he loved. But their marriage is dissolving, to the distress of their young son Joseph. Returning from a job interview in New York, David is the sole survivor of a horrific train wreck that kills the other 131 passengers, yet he sustains no injuries whatsoever. He is contacted by the now-adult Elijah Price, who proposes to a disbelieving Dunn that David is a real instance of the kind of person after whom comic-book superheroes are modeled. David tries to ignore Elijah, but Elijah stalks David and his wife, trying to get David to listen to him. David's son Joseph already idolizes his father and easily believes his father is a superhero, but Audrey believes that Elijah Price has probably become mentally ill as a result of the stress of his frailty.

To relieve his family from further distress, Dunn finally agrees to hear Price out, and begins to test himself. While lifting weights with his son Joseph, they discover that his physical strength doesn't have a limit. Under Elijah's influence, David develops his security-guard hunches into extra-sensory perception, with which Dunn can glimpse immoral acts committed by people whom he touches.

David's faith in Elijah is shaken when he remembers an incident from his childhood in which he almost drowned. However, Elijah intuits that the incident was an encounter with David's one viable weakness: water. At Elijah's suggestion, David walks through a crowd in a Philadelphia train station and witnesses crimes perpetrated by strangers who brush past him: a jewel thief, a white supremacist, and a rapist. The worst offender is the last: a sadistic janitor, who is holding a family hostage and torturing them inside their home. David follows the janitor back to the victims' house. David is ambushed by the lurking janitor who throws David off a balcony into a pool below. David nearly drowns but is rescued by the children he freed. He then subdues and kills the janitor, thereby rescuing the family. That night, David reconciles with his wife. The next morning, he shows the newspaper article of his anonymous heroic act to his son, but he also gestures with his hand that he does not want his son to tell his mother about the article.

In the closing of the film, David attends an exhibition at Elijah's comic book art gallery and gets to meet Elijah's mother. After talking with Elijah in the back room of his studio, David shakes Elijah's hand and discovers to his horror that Elijah caused several fatal disasters, causing over four hundred deaths, the last being the train accident that David survived. Elijah insists that the many deaths were justified as a means to find David. He then explains that his purpose in life is to be the villain to David's hero, even going so far as to suggest that his childhood moniker, "Mr. Glass" should have alerted him to the fact that he was always a villain, and that was his villainous title. The final captions reveal that David led police to Elijah, who was committed to an institution for the criminally insane.

Cast

• Bruce Willis - David Dunn
• Samuel L. Jackson - Elijah Price
• Robin Wright Penn - Audrey Inverso Dunn
• Spencer Treat Clark - Joseph Dunn
• Charlayne Woodard - Mrs. Price
• Leslie Stefanson - Kelly
• Eamonn Walker - Dr. Mathison
• Tash - True life survivor of the 16:45 from London Cannon Street train crash

Production

Development

In a DVD bonus feature, Shyamalan noted that the film's script originally had a comic book's traditional three-part structure (the superhero's "birth", his or her struggles against general evil-doers, and the superhero's ultimate battle against the "archenemy"). Finding the "birth" section more interesting than the remainder, he decided to base the entire movie on the idea.

Filming

• This is the fourth movie that Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson have appeared in together. The first was Loaded Weapon 1, the second, Pulp Fiction, and the third, Die Hard with a Vengeance.
• As he does in his other movies, M. Night Shyamalan makes a cameo appearance. Here Shyamalan plays a man who David suspects of dealing drugs inside the university stadium where David works.
• The stadium where Bruce Willis' character works as a security guard was filmed in University City at the University of Pennsylvania's historic Franklin Field. Mr. Glass' fall down the train steps occurs at the nearby SEPTA University City train station on the Spruce Street entrance.
• Like with many films made by M. Night Shyamalan, color plays an important part in the film. According to DVD bonus features, green was selected as David's color, while purple represents Elijah. (David's poncho is green, and Elijah wears purple in the majority of his scenes.) Samuel L. Jackson apparently made the suggestion himself that Elijah's color be purple, feeling the character had a "regal" quality to him (Jackson also suggested his character in Star Wars should have a purple lightsaber). Also, Unbreakable's "minor" villain is identified chiefly through his bright orange clothing. Similarly, other "villains" David touches being are identifiable due to their brightly colored clothes. (Scenes briefly show them committing crimes, and each is entirely green/red/etc.)
• The movie itself, as revealed in the extra features, was filmed "like a comic book". For instance, in the first scene with David Dunn, the seats in front of him act like the frame of a comic panel.

Editing

The ending captions were not in the original cut of the film, but put in because test audiences complained about the last scene's ambiguity. Each time Elijah Price is first shown as a baby, a child and again as an adult, it is in a glass reflection.

Marketing

Shyamalan wanted to market Unbreakable as a comic-book movie about the story of an unlikely superhero; however executives from Walt Disney Studios, seeing the massive success of his previous film, The Sixth Sense, insisted on portraying it as a similar spooky thriller in advertisements.¹

Deleted scenes

A deleted scene had a conversation between Dunn and a priest who elaborates on the disasters that the city has recently experienced: an airplane crashed on takeoff and his cousin was aboard; a hotel caught fire and an entire family from his parish died; his nephew was in the train wreck in which Dunn was the sole survivor. Subsequently, he is enraged at Dunn's suggestion that something is special about him in particular. In another deleted scene, Dunn tests his strength a second time. Slipping unnoticed into the locker room of the football stadium (while the players are changing) he uses the athletic equipment to bench press roughly five hundred pounds while the players look on in awe. This scene was deemed superfluous by Shyamalan as he had already established Dunn's superhuman strength in an earlier scene. However both scenes are present in the TV airings, including the one on the G4 Network.

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Unbreakable

• Unbreakable at the Internet Movie Database
• Unbreakable - M. Night Shyamalan Online
• M. Night Fans - Unbreakable
• Unbreakable at Rotten Tomatoes
• Movie Mythology on Unbreakable