(WARNING: There are spoilers)

CONTINUED FROM PART 1...

Besides being the first great superhero movie, Unbreakable is also the most masterful of M. Night Shyamalan's thrillers. The Sixth Sense may pack more of an emotional wallop and Signs may be more suspenseful, but with this film, Shyamalan is at the height of his marvelous filmmaking powers. All of his usual devices are used here to maximum artistic effect. In these movies, he often uses extended takes to make the audience feel like they are a part of the film's world, no matter how supernatural the situations are. No where is this more true than in this movie. Because the film's premise is pretty odd and unconventional, the takes are very long and the camera is sometimes in voyeuristic angles. A fine example of this is the shot in-between the train seats as David talks to the woman next to him.

He also uses the camera to look through glass or at the reflections. In this movie, the first images in both of Elijah's flashback scenes and his first scene as an adult are reflections on glass. This visual motif has two meanings. The first meaning is that Elijah was called "Mr. Glass." The second meaning is figurative; reflections are a way of looking at ourselves to see who we are, which is a problem that Elijah reveals about himself at the end of the film (see the quote above). This motif is also used with David as well, but not as much. In an early scene at his job, we see David's reflection on a mirror in his locker. At this point in the movie, David is questioning himself and who he really is, which is quite similar to the way the reflections are used with Elijah. Also, when the two men first meet each other, we see them through a window.

Shyamalan has such superior skill and control of his craft that he is able to make the most simple and mundane events into suspenseful and thrilling vignettes. There are little to no visual effects shots used anywhere in the film. I should also note that these scenes' effectiveness is in no small part from composer James Newton Howard's haunting score and the editing of Dylan Tichenor. Shyamalan creates suspense from a chase scene involving two people walking, a walk down a flight of stairs, being in a swimming pool, and a walk through a train station. The train station sequence may not seem like an ordinary event because of the superpowers involved, but when you really observe the scene, it's basically just David walking around and looking at people. Even though the scene with David's son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark) and the gun is no ordinary event, it's quite remarkable when a thriller, a genre rife with firearms, is able to elicit a gasp from just the sight of one.

Then, there's the twisted ending (the first line of which is, ironically, "It has begun"). It's the quality that made The Sixth Sense (and Shyamalan) so famous in the first place. The ending of that movie was definitely more shocking and caused hordes of people to re-watch the entire thing, but the ending of Unbreakable is far more chilling. Bruce Willis' character was revealed to be a ghost in The Sixth Sense, but he was still the same good person that he was before. In this film, Elijah seems to be a good (albeit strange) man, a confidant and ally to David. But in the end, he is revealed as a totally different person: he was a monster all along, the great villain to Bruce Willis' great hero. What makes it all the more creepy is that when Elijah says, "Now that we know who you are, I know who I am," it's as if he is suppressing some sort of sinister laugh underneath. Unbreakable is a great and thrilling motion picture. It is the bright, shining jewel of M. Night Shyamalan's career.