Review: The Happening
First of all, this film isn’t THAT bad. It has an interesting idea behind it and several scenes that are worthwhile. The critics have almost universally despised it and I think that’s somewhat unfair considering it isn’t nearly as bad as a lot of releases. I guarantee those critics have not lambasted films far worse and whose content don’t have anything nearly as original as the basic premise of Shymalan’s “The Happening”. I have major problems with this flick, but I’m writing about it and I can’t say you shouldn’t see it.
Spoilers as usual. Don’t bother with reviews if you don’t want spoilers people.
The plot reminds me of “The Terminator” series, but instead of Skynet coming on-line and figuring out humans are a threat to them the plants get gnarly and start making people do zany shit like jump of high-rises and take a nap in front of heavy machinery. The characters painfully explain what’s happening in the film every step of the way. Are audiences so dumb they need this sort of hand holding? It’s offensive to me when a filmmaker doesn’t trust me to figure things out. While the characters update us as to what we can clearly see what is happening the dialog is bad and it makes really proficient actors look bad. I like some of this dudes films, but they always seem really flat to me. I noticed it first in “Unbreakable” which I distinctly remember as being a film that had absolutely no dynamics and simply found a droning level and carried it the whole film. This style (if you assume it’s intentional as I do) is present in The Happening and it makes the film pretty tedious. Especially when we have to deal with our characters doing things like outrunning wind and finding random crazy ladies as some of the events that breakup the monotony.
The shotgun scene where a survival-minded individual holed up in a house starts blowing away kids that won’t get off his damn deck was where the film showed glimpses of where this flick could have gone. Maybe Shymalan figured the fear-of-your-fellow-man has been done in the Zombie genre (recently done real well in the excellent “28 Days Later”) or even the completely entertaining “War of the Worlds” remake. I could have stood a little more of it here, though I’m sure the intention is to keep the narrative of “fuck with nature and it’ll fuck you right back” intact and focused.
All this said this movie isn’t nearly as awful as you may hear. A flawed attempt at something fairly original with this type of budget shouldn’t be universally despised like it has been. For the record the count of the word “happening” in this post is 4 and the amount of times I tried to be clever with a joke or pun based on that word is 0. Show some restraint people. Please.
Verdict: Rent It