Everyone's favorite, slowly disintegrating, eternally self-destructing megalomaniac is back. That's right, M. Night Shyamalan has returned once again to grace us with another dark, moody, science-fiction-by-way-of-Hitchcock film that will have everyone all abuzz. This time it's called The Happening. And even his most devoted detractors are sitting up and taking notice. The question is, as always, will this be the triumphant return of the genius that directed The Sixth Sense – or will it prove to be yet a further cinematic slide into madness?

Now I don't want to bag on the guy too much. I actually quite like Shyamalan, but his history has been pretty sketchy. The one thing we can almost all agree on is that his third film (the one most people regard as his first), The Sixth Sense, is a modern horror masterpiece. But his follow-up, Unbreakable, is another story. Tragically flawed with an ending 30 seconds too short, the film proved to be too anti-climactic for some. Others didn't quite grasp the comic-book nature of the film. But as a predecessor of Heroes, this film stands not only as a clear inspiration for that show – but as the model for how to pull it off without a huge budget. But the ending still kinda sucks.

Then he moved on to Signs, a huge blockbuster hit that left audiences walking out scratching their heads and asking questions like "Wait, if the aliens were allergic to water, why the hell did they come to a planet almost entirely covered in it, with an atmosphere filled with humidity, to eat creatures that were made of 90% water themselves?" Then they started to tackle the tougher inconsistencies.

But then he completely began to melt down. Locked into his trend of creating the big clincher, twist ending, he made a film with a twist visible from the trailer and created what became his first love-it-or-hate-it work: The Village. Some praised it for its inventiveness. Others, like myself, hated that we knew the end of the film before we saw the beginning, especially since the whole film was about the ending and served no other purpose than to take us there.

But the final straw was his last film, Lady in the Water. Preceded by a ranting-and-raving work of self-absorbed non-fiction detailing why Disney refused to back making this disaster, the film opened to scathing reviews and a public almost ready to hang him for it. Silly, almost nonsensical and actually bordering on revealing just how self-involved Shyamalan truly is, the film was about how a writer (played by Shyamalan himself) could save the world with his words. Oh, yeah, and the critic who mocks him gets killed by a ravenous monster. Walking out of this I was reminded distinctly of Oscar Wilde. Not the Oscar Wilde that wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Oscar Wilde that got out of prison and wrote a book about how he was the modern Christ being persecuted for his lifestyle.

Yeah. Just a little bit crazy.

But that new trailer for The Happening is pretty boss. It looks a lot like the reception for his last film woke him up and inspired him to go back to what works. I await it with bated breath.

C. Robert Cargill - - - Email Me

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