I seem to be one of the few people, or at least one of the few people writing reviews, who actually liked The Happening. Perhaps this is because I am a transcendent being whose ability to see quality is far beyond that of mere mortals such as yourself. Or maybe it's because I always appreciate a horror film that doesn't involve sadistic geniuses who go on laughably stupid killing sprees that work only because the writers who control their destinies say that they work. Or maybe this is a case of the subjective taste of the audience in action and that even the worst movies ever made can usually garner at least a few fans (case in point: this piece of crap is getting remade). Anyway, all I can do is explain why I liked it and why anyone who disagrees with me is a doofus.
First off, M. Night Shyamalan is someone who can truly be described as a guy who was born to direct movies. Shyamalan shoots scenes in The Happening such a way that you suddenly tense up simply because the wind starts to blow or because a child is playing on a swing. I make the same point here that I recently made about The Strangers, that the flaws of the movie lay not in the directing but in the writing. The movie opens in New York's Central Park. This hasn't been a good year for movies set in Central Park. The last time we saw it was in Cloverfield when some some ten story tall fish monster went rampaging through it. In this movie, people suddenly and inexplicably go crazy and start killing themselves. New York City should really start reading some of these scripts before they grant film permits to people who want to portray Central Park as a dramatic slaughterhouse before it starts impacting tourism.
After the mass suicide, we cut to a classroom in Philadelphia where teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) is giving his class a lesson in how to foreshadow horrific events by asking them about the possible causes of mysterious bee disappearances all through the country. After dismissing numerous answers, he finally gets the stupid answer he wants: that it's an act of nature no one will fully understand. I'll talk more about that later. Elliot gets pulled out of class for an emergency teachers meeting to discuss that they were sending the students home early because what is believed to be a terrorist attack in New York City and OH MAN are they ever wrong about that but we don't find that out till later.
The event, whatever it is, starts spreading to other cities so Elliot grabs his somewhat neurotic wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel), and gets the hell out of Philly along with his buddy Julian (John Leguizamo). Jess doesn't like Alma for vague and unimportant reasons that end up having zero impact on the plot but that doesn't stop him from constantly being hostile toward her. Alma also may be having an affair, a subject that could probably wait until after the apocalypse is over to be dealt with but let's just say that Alma seems to disagree with me on that.
Circumstances cause Julian to leave his daughter, Jess, with Elliot and Alma and the three start journeying across the countryside trying to outrun the event that is attacking smaller and smaller populations. This, I suppose, is symbolized by the fact that they keep running into crazier and crazier people as they try to stay alive and figure out what the hell is going on.
So what is going on? I don't want to reveal too much but I will say that, while watching The Happening, I kept thinking about the classic Hitchcock film The Birds, partly because I believe it's fair to compare Shyamalan to Hitchcock and partly because of plot similarities. I will say that, like The Birds, nature itself seems to be rising up against humanity. The various theories espoused in the movie have predictably gotten it on the right wing hit list but has also gotten left wingers going. Right wingers have gone into rant mode because possible reasons for the event are global warming which they don't think exists and nuclear power plants which they think should be placed in every neighborhood except for the ones in which they live. Lefties don't like it because of the movie's supposed advocacy of Intelligent Design and the anti-science attitude I alluded to in the first paragraph. As for the Intelligent Design, sorry folks, I just didn't see it. This seems to be coming not from what's on the screen but from interviews being given by M. Night Shyamalan like this one where Shyamalan speaks wistfully about how even Albert Einstein thought that maybe the hand of God could be seen in the workings of the universe. Thinking about the movie itself, however, I just can't think of anything that could be interpreted as, "Jesus is making all these people kill themselves."
What's definitely there is the dumb idea that some things simply can't be explained. Shyamalan is lucky that I am able to enjoy a movie that espouses ideas with which I disagree since that backward idea of "There are things man was not meant to know," was stupid when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein (pronounced Frahnk-en-steen). If we listened to the people who said that some problems will never be solved, we'd never have gone to space, found the vaccine for polio or made it possible to download pictures of Scarlett Johannson in her bikini anytime we want them. Think about that next time you feel like shooting off your mouth, Shyamalan.
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