The Happening

Saw the new M. Night Shyamalan movie The Happening the other night, going into it expecting it to be bad after having heard numerous negative critical reviews. This said, I didn't think it was horrible, but certainly questionable. To set things straight, let me just get it out there that I do believe Shyamalan is HIGHLY overrated. Sure The Sixth Sense was genuinely good, and The Village was good once you realized it wasn't really a horror film, but short of that, everything else really was blown out of proportion.

The premise of The Happening is that everyone in the North East is being wiped out by an initially unknown airborne agent that's causing everyone to kill themselves as soon as they figure out a good way (usually as gruesome as possible) to do so. About half way through the movie the characters settle on the idea that the pathogen is actually being created by the flora in a presumable attempt to kill off the environmentally unkind human population. So essentially, what Shyamalan has created is a movie about trees killing people. A little silly, I guess, but it could have worked...

...had the acting, script, plot, and direction been much better. Instead, what we're left with is Mark Wahlberg and company acting generally strange throughout the film (despite supposedly being normal citizens), often just serving as a vantage point from which to view a bunch of grizzly suicides (essentially the only consistently high-quality thing about this film). Even though the sense of dread that comes from the way the concept of the trees killing everyone off is built up throughout the film is fairly well done, it starts to lose momentum by the third act, where Shyamalan starts focusing on some creepy old lady who seems to have very little to do with the film.

Besides the environmental moral of the story (which is quite heavy-handed, really), the only other message that MIGHT be presented here is something having to do with how isolationist we've become, right or wrong. But then again, Shyamalan's storytelling is so meandering that it's kinda hard to tell what he was going for at all, so whatever...