Movies: Night Vision

NIGHT HAS HAD INVITATIONS to step outside the echo chamber of his own design. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas asked him to script the return of his cinematic idol, Indiana Jones, but Night passed, saying he felt he couldn’t improve on the originals. Most recently, Night planned to tackle Life of Pi, the best-selling novel about a kid from his birthplace — Pondicherry, India — stuck on a raft with a tiger. The local film community buzzed that Night was in talks to build a massive water tank at the Navy Yard. Which side balked — Philly, or 20th Century Fox — neither will confirm. All that’s certain is that Pi isn’t in Night’s future.

That leaves only one project on the horizon — his mermaid movie. The original teaser billed it as a fairy tale, one for the kids. “My name’s become an adjective for something scary, and I wanted to change that,” Night said recently. But in May, when he debuted the full trailer on the talk show hosted by Ellen DeGeneres — a fellow AmEx client — it was much darker. A woman’s haunting voice wails as you see an apartment complex, The Cove, and its swimming pool. Enter Ominous Voiceover Guy, who intones, with dread: “When the door to her world is opened … others will come through.” Doors rattle. Something growls. Giamatti cradles Howard and runs for his life.

To borrow a metaphor from basketball, Night’s favorite sport, the shot clock is winding down, and the ball is in his hands. He has the control he’s always hungered for, and the chance to conjure up another Sixth moment. But the only aspect of Lady In the Water he can’t control is the most important — what happens on July 21st, and in the weeks to follow. There’s another twist coming in the story of M. Night Shyamalan. It will be written by moviegoers all across the country. In Night’s script, this story ends with a glorious marriage of marketing with his own star power as American embraces his sea-nymph fable. Should audiences decide on a different ending, it could be a lot scarier for Night than visions of hydrophobic aliens and dead people.