The Happening
Warning! Watching The Happening may make you commit suicide.
Before hearing what I have to say, know that I ‘m an M. Night Shyamalan fan. In my opinion, The Sixth Sense is a supernatural thriller which threw everyone for a loop, Unbreakable is a beautiful, personal struggle about learning your strengths, Signs is a testimony of God and divinity, The Village is touching story about the cost of love and loss, and Lady In The Water is a fairytale for adults that gives us a chance to feel like kids again.
The trailers for The Happening have been vague, as if hiding a secret as big as The Sixth Sense’s ending. All you know beforehand is that an airborne toxin is blowing around, causing people to lose control of their speech, become disoriented, and kill themselves in the quickest way possible. Even if you hate Shyamalan, you have to admit it’s an amazing idea for a film.
Out of everyone who I know, I’m the only one who has wanted to like this movie. You’re reading it from the words of a huge Shyamalan fan: The Happening is the worst movie of the year. Here’s what I think:
On Yahoo’s movie site, there’s an exclusive clip of The Happening beginning with a two-minute segment in which Shyamalan explains how he came up with the idea. He gets so excited about how great an idea it was that you feel like he might tell you the whole thing instead of show you the clip.
I think Shyamalan came up with such a great idea — which it definitely is — that he wrote and filmed the movie too quickly, not focusing on characters, story or direction.
Nearly the entire movie focuses on a small group of people aimlessly wandering around through the Pennsylvania countryside trying to escape an invisible monster. Of the three main characters played by Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel and John Leguizamo, the only one that you care for has the least screen time. The film attempts to bring up emotion between the other two, but you never care about them. And the side characters are so odd and outlandish that, at times, you fear them more than you fear the results of the toxin.
In all of his other films, Shyamalan banked on his intensity by never showing you anything. He let your imagination paint the picture. In his introduction to the Yahoo clip, he explains that the only way he could make this film as frightening as it could be was to show you everything, landing it an R-rating. The only problem with that becomes evident as you watch the film — Shyamalan doesn’t know how to effectively show you graphic violence.
Minor spoilers:
In one great scene, you see a cop from the abdomen down. You see his hand retrieve his gun and go off screen. His body falls lifelessly to the ground with a bullet hole in his forehead. As the camera pans back, you see where the gun fell. Feet appear on the screen as another person’s hand picks it up. Bang. Another body falls dead into the frame. And again. That scene
works. We did not need to see the shot to the head to feel the threat.
In another scene, this one less effective, you see a zookeeper walking zombie-like into a lion den. He dangles his arms in front of a female lion, who slowly rips the man’s arm off. After seeing the reaction from spectators, we cut back to the one-armed man. Already afflicted with one bleeding stump, he quickly loses his other arm to another lion’s gaping maw. It’s obvious Shyamalan was trying to make a shocking scene, but instead it feels like a Saturday Night Live sketch mocking his movie.
End spoilers.
The Happening feels like a made-for-TV disaster movie. While it has an amazing idea, it never even gets close to reaching its potential. And if the critics’ harsh reviews of The Village caused Shyamalan to kill a critic character in Lady In The Water, I’m afraid our bad reviews of The Happening may throw him overboard. This time, he’s either going to kill a real critic, retire, or go into hiding, write something amazing and, in a few years, blow us all away. Let’s hope he chooses the latter.
Photo credit: 20th Century Fox
