Before The MCU, An Underrated Superhero Movie Knew How All-Consuming Fandom Could Be
Unbreakable feels like it should’ve been released at the tail end of the superhero boom, not the beginning.
M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable was released at a high-pressure moment for the director. He had just made The Sixth Sense, a movie that became a phenomenon and even earned attention at the Oscars. Unbreakable was released the next year, and was a swerve, to say the least.
Coming out just months after the first X-Men movie hit theaters, Unbreakable follows David (a subdued, wonderful Bruce Willis), a man who survives a train crash and slowly begins to suspect that he has supernatural abilities. As he works to understand his powers and use them for good, he learns more about how his story does and does not align with the conventions of comic books.
At the time, Unbreakable received a muted but positive response from critics and did not go on to become the same kind of phenomenon The Sixth Sense was. Twenty-five years later, though, the movie feels strangely prescient. Unbreakable opens with a series of title cards that feel at least a little like self-justification. The cards explain just how popular comic books are, as if saying that these movies deserve respect because of their popularity with a segment of the public. That kind of justification would feel totally unnecessary even five years later, after two Spider-Man movies and Batman Begins had started to assert a new era of superhero dominance.
Unbreakable feels like the kind of movie that should have come at the end of the superhero boom (aka now) instead of the beginning. The movie is, quite intentionally, about an obsessed fan who becomes convinced that superheroes are real, and so decides to commit acts of terror to suss out his potential arch-nemesis. Shyamalan is intentionally coy about whether superheroes are real or not in this universe, but that’s not really the point.
Instead, Shyamalan hones in on one of the core ideas of many comic book stories: destiny. Samuel L. Jackson’s Mr. Glass doesn’t believe in coincidence, and he treats the comic books he obsesses over like prophetic texts. “You know what the scariest thing is? To not know your place in this world,” he says several times, a reminder that he’s not afraid of being a villain, he’s afraid of being a mistake.
Glass’ search for a larger purpose, his belief in something greater, comes from his chosen religion: the stories and arcs of comic books. He takes those beliefs to fanatical lengths, searching for his foil and the man who can make his story complete. His fragile body and enormous intellect have convinced him that he is special, and he’s looking for someone who can challenge him. Glass is, at his core, a toxic fan, someone who believes too deeply in the stories he’s devoted his life to. The story’s signature twist, a staple for Shyamalan during this era, reveals Glass to be not just toxic, but also a potentially delusional maniac willing to murder hundreds of people in pursuit of his destiny.
Unbreakable’s late-act villain reveal overshadowed how strangely prescient Mr. Glass would become.
In an era when these kinds of toxic fans have dictated much of popular culture for the better part of 15 years (albeit never to these extremes), Mr. Glass feels decidedly more recognizable now than he did when the movie was released. He has taken the ideology of the stories he loves and warped it. He has turned himself into a villain because the comic books he reads told him he could never be anything else.
This reveal coming when it does, at the very end of the movie, is also a crucial reminder that Unbreakable is not in and of itself a conventional comic book movie. It’s an origin story, but one that intentionally conceals its villain, and ends without any sort of climactic showdown between the hero and his foil. Unbreakable is also notably light on action, and the superpowers on display are not particularly showy. It feels like a riff on a formula that doesn’t really exist yet.
Unbreakable’s story, of a toxic fan who murders hundreds in the search for a rival, feels like the kind of superhero story one could see in today’s Marvel-saturated world. Shyamalan had this story ready 25 years ago, and it’s clear now that even then he understood how obsession could warp these stories into something sinister. There are plenty of lovely comic book fans out in the world. David’s son is one of them and helps his father wield and understand his powers. Mr. Glass is a reminder, though, that there are plenty of people who take this stuff too seriously and make it harder for the rest of us to love it.
