The superpower within...

Glass (2019)

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Is having superpower abilities real, or is it merely a construct of our creative mind? We have grown up looking at comics and movies, yearning to be invincible people who could fly like a plane and jump buildings in a single bound.

We longed secretly to have that single superpower, not to change the world, but to be better than the most intelligent guy in class; or the tallest, the strongest, the funniest, pick your pick.

In the annals of time, somehow, we lost interest in all this sorcery. The journey of life straddled us thus far. We look back at our lives and are happy with what we see. We cannot fathom how the heck we managed to achieve all of these. Given a chance to do it all again, we are sure we would not have made it. The hard knocks that life had to offer pushed us to achieve the impossible. Perhaps they awoke the sleeping superbeing within us to fight our inner demons to come out tops. Sometimes we marvel at our achievements and ask ourselves how we did all the things we did - that public exams, that marathon, that earth-defying feat. We doubt we could reproduce such results if we were to do them all over again.

In other words, we have powers within us waiting to be harnessed. We need not go around looking high and low for that push. No beam of light will shine from above to give it extraordinary powers. Still, all have us have that feared Kryptonite that may ruin us. Stay away!

In a convoluted way, this is the subtle message this film is trying to impart. Three characters with superpowers within their own rights - David Dunn (Overseer), Kevin Crumb (with multiple identities, including the Beast) and Elijah Price (Mr Glass).

The Overseer, the unassuming middle-aged man with incredible strength, with the help of with adult son, manages to capture the Beast, who is high on alert for kidnapping four teenage girls. But both Overseer and Crumb are captured and held in a high-security infirmary. Within the facility, the apparently catatonic Glass is also kept. The doctor in charge of them is part of a secret organisation out on a crusade to tell the world that there are no superheroes but disillusioned individuals with delusions of grandeur. In their defence come Glass' mother, Dunn's son and Casey Cooke, the victim who escaped Beast's clutches in the second offering of this trilogy, Split (2017).

Glass plans an elaborate escape route to announce to the world that they indeed have superpowers.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.