Glass Shattered my Expectations

A few months ago, my family and I were at the movies, and we saw the trailer for Glass. The movie really intrigued my mother and she wanted to see it, but first we had to watch Unbreakable and Split, both of which were great movies. Glass was also a great movie, but it was rather different from my expectations. I would highly recommend watching the movie before reading this review, or at least skip the spoiler section.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

The basis of the plot follows David Dunn (The Overseer) as he tracks down Kevin Wendell Crumb (The Horde/The Beast/ James McAvoy’s character from Split) in order to rescue another group of kidnapped girls. He is successful, but after that he finds himself locked up in a mental institute where a psychiatrist is trying to convince him and Kevin that they aren’t actually superhuman. It is also revealed that Elijah Price (Mr. Glass) is at the institute as well and he is also being treated by the psychiatrist. What follows is an interesting battle of wits where Mr. Glass works to break the three of them out in order to show the world that superheroes and villains do exist. And he is successful, but not in the way that I initially thought.

My biggest gripe with the movie concerns one of its twists. Glass has three really big twists, all of which happen towards the end of the movie. I’ll get to the other two in a minute, but first I want to talk about why I didn’t like the second twist. The second twist is that the psychiatrist is actually a part of a secret organization that keeps both superheroes and supervillians hidden from the world. I wasn’t a fan of this twist, in part because it caused David Dunn and Kevin Wendell Crumb to die. However, this twist also seemed to come out of nowhere with no real foreshadowing. If you have read my Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse review, then you will know that one thing that I really like is when a twist has ample foreshadowing but isn’t directly given away. That is why I really liked the other two twists.

The first twist is that Kevin’s father, who left home and never came back, which led to the creation of The Beast, was killed on the train crash in Unbreakable. This twist is interesting, because it is somewhat hinted at earlier in the movie when Joseph, David’s son, is doing research on Kevin. And looking back, there is even some foreshadowing in Split when The Beast first appears at a train station. Another reason that I found this twist to be particularly interesting is because it causes The Beast to attack and fatally wound Mr. Glass, who up until then had been his ally.

The third twist is that Mr. Glass’ plan wasn’t to actually have The Overseer and The Beast fight in front of the world at a building that was just being unveiled. Instead, he just needed them to fight outside of the mental institute, because their battle would be caught on the security cameras, which he streamed to a personal server. Mr. Glass then had these video sent to his mother, Joseph, and Casey (the girl from Split), who then shared them with the world and revealed that superheroes and villains do in fact exist. I like this twist, for a few reasons. First, Mr. Glass is seen in an earlier scene typing away at a computer, but it isn’t really explained until this twist. Second, it brings closure to the movie. I really don’t like the fact that the three main characters ended up dead, as well as the truths about each of them, but this twist really changed that and gave me some of the closure that I wanted.

SPOILERS END

Something else that I would like to briefly discuss is the character of Mr. Glass. While he was featured in Unbreakable, Glass really expanded upon him as a character and made him a bit more interesting in my opinion. After seeing all three movies in the series, I can confidently say that Mr. Glass is the villain because his ends don’t justify the means. Mr. Glass wanted to show the world that superheroes exist, but the only way to do this is to kill a lot of people. Likewise in Glass, Mr. Glass isn’t afraid to let other people die in order to further his own goal, which is not inherently evil (I mean the goal isn’t evil, the actions totally are). And it is because of this complexity that I do like Mr. Glass as a character.

Now the final thing that I want to mention is the cinematography. After having watched Unbreakable and Split, I was exposed to M. Night Shyamalan and his style, and it was interesting seeing Glass because of this. Shyamalan is not afraid to use different angles in order to make some really nice and powerful shots, and I really enjoyed this aspect of the movie, especially after having taken a film study class.

I thoroughly enjoyed Glass and I would definitely recommend it. Glass is a very different and non-traditional superhero movie, but I think that is why it is such a good movie. The superhero aspect is muted, because superheroes aren’t a normal part of this world. It’s so common for superhero movies to just make heroes and villains a common aspect of life and society, so it’s refreshing watching a movie where the opposite is true. Overall, I would give Glass a solid 8/10.