The Happening would always be something of a challenge for M. Night Shyamalan. Had he made this film immediately after The Sixth Sense everything would have been different. Post The Sixth Sense, every film of Shyamalan has revealed the chinks in the director’s armor. From being someone who couldn’t make any mistakes and was touted to be the next Spielberg, Shyamalan’s successive films have each shown with increasing efficiency how Shyamalan could goof it up. There was hardly any buzz about The Happening while it was being made and even the pre-release publicity was low-key. Perhaps the director wanted to quietly return to the party he prematurely took off from.
The Happening doesn’t highlight the sense of urgency or chaos that would usually accompany an event that forces people to flee their homes. Nor does it indulge in a post-apocalyptic scenario as seen in films like I Am Legend. The Happening does manage to build up the tension with some very good moments of sheer shock but that is just as far as M. Night Shyamalan ventures. This film isn’t anything more than an effort to return to the territory that he is famous for. While it’s could be understandable that Shyamalan chooses to avoid large scale frenzy of The War of the Worlds and makes the events of The Happening more internal, the mediocre acting leaves an incomplete feeling. The director isn’t really known for managing to extract ‘performances’ from his actors and The Happening doesn’t change that claim.
Once the characters are in the open, running away from whatever is causing the destruction, the sense of despondency is hardly visible. Elliot and Alma behave as if they are running late for a dinner more than anything else. Shyamalan sets the drama in the countryside so even if, according to him, he is portraying a despondency, it really falls flat. One is used to the visceral images of 28 Days Later so to expect people to really feel forlorn as they iron out domestic issues while walking through the serene landscape isn’t really happening! Why would a director who is making a film about doomsday avoid showing the rioting and the chaos? The film thankfully is well paced and allows time for a buildup but to what end?
One can’t help but feel let down by the time the film reaches its conclusion. The last scene is supposed to send out conflicting signals of hope and doom at the same time but looks sardonically funny to say the least. We really don’t get to know the whys of the whos that caused the whats in the film but that could be because Shyamalan might have tried to peter out of the damed-if-I-do-and-damed-if-I-don’t twist in the end. Sadly if he had decided to use a more intellectual approach for The Happening he should have given the actors more to do than mouth mostly inane lines. Mark Wahlberg comes across as the universal elder brother leading every one to safety as he solves all the problems at hand using a quick scientific approach. Zooey Deschanel as Alma sleepwalks through her character like a wide-eyed mare! The film also features John Leguizamo who happens to be the pick of the actors but hardly has a role. The Happening has some truly good moments and the best thing you could do is to figure them out. For even if you lose track of what’s happening, it doesn’t matter because even at the end no one knows what really happened!
Oh come on visitor it was just a bad movie. ;)
well, David, if thats all you saw, then too bad. :)
The dialog KILLED this movie. From the very first line. It was painful to watch. Sure, a few good moments here and there. And the concept is golden. Just poorly, POORLY executed. I was cringing most of the way through. Dammit, M. Night, let someone else write your stories!
M. Night Shyamalan is certainly a product of the multiplex age. All of his films aim for a wide audience, although unlike many an anonymous blockbuster direction, his films are both instantly recognizable and aim to stretch audiences whilst entertaining them. His success in this department is spotty, often his films are little more than the sum of their extraordinarily crafted parts. He has somewhat of a handicap in the screenwriting department (notice his earlier films The 6th Sense, Unbreakable and Signs were more widely successful due to a launguid, brooding pace which minimized the dialogue usually aiming for silences to do the heavy lifting). But while he may come back to similar themes (redemption, solving human problems in extraordinary circumstances) Shyamalan nevertheless retains a desire to experiment with individual elements of the form. The unusual exposition techniques employed in Lady in the Water may have baffled audiences into writing off that film (well that and this own hagiographic hubris); with The Happening he has taken these experiments further.
The principle characters are mainly in the dark as to what is actually going on, yet there are many cutaways to television news bits and incidental cellular phone conversations from background players. Many of these experiments fail, in a modern film it seems a bit silly for someone in a panic to put their phone on speaker (for the audience’s information). I would love to see M. Night and David Mamet argue over how to pass information along to an audience because they take decidedly opposite approaches. In the exposition department, The Happening is definitely not Spartan. Furthermore, a wholly unnecessary (and perhaps unintentionally) hilarious iPhone scene involving a lion tamer which looks like it is from either Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, or Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers undercuts horrific tension because it is just too darn goofy. A certain type of film-lover may like that scene, but really, why chop your film off at the knees for something so acutely unnecessary?
These over the top gore moments are combined with (intentionally?) oddball performances from the three leads. In perhaps the worst performance of his career Mark Wahlberg lays it on really thick as the much-suffering wounded puppy with maximum pout towards a wet-blanket Zooey Deschanel. But the cheese-cake award goes to a way-over-the-top Betty Buckley serving as a stand-in for Tim Robbins character in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds or Marcia Gay Harden in The Mist. In fact it seems like Shyamalan wants to play in the same sandbox as Spielberg or Darabont as modern takes on 1950’s B-Sci-fi filcks go. Yet The Happening has neither the delicious subtext of former or the full-on embrace of the style in the latter. Full disclosure, Wahlberg’s nutty performance by the end of the film had won me over.
Despite a laundry lists of flaws, The Happening succeeds as an edge-of-your-seat apocalypse flick even if you can’t take too much of it seriously. Even with this type of scenario tackled so often in the past 5 years or so, the unpredictable nuttiness from scene-to-scene makes (will it be serious, will it be funny, will the characters attempt to outrun the wind?) it a more engrossing than most. I’m tempted to label it a winner in a lackluster year for blockbusters.
Am glad that we all have such different view points but Visitor you really think that Shyamalan delivered with regards to The Happening?
I agree that it does have great moments but more than that. I believe that Shyamalan played it very safe. When I question that why didn't he go all out with the chaos and chose to go in the opposite direction, I truly believe that he was trying to smart about the whole thing. I mean if the train lost contact and communication with 'everyone' how the hell does the cell phone work? It seems like very convenient on the part of the director to impart information to the viewer. A point very well elaborated by one of the posts, thanks Kurt Halfyard.
In an attempt to make the film a more an internal than external, Shyamalan can't get away with buttering both sides of the toast. But for anyone who has seen the desolation depicted by I Am Legend or 28 Days Later, the Happening just won't reach home. Most of us say that Speilberg and Will Smith are big commercial names but the fact of the matter is that Shyamalan isn't really a babe in the woods. He is marquee director whose films sell on his name. He is almost like #1 in the field of 1.
As far as acting is concerned then Bryce Dallas Howard followed up The Village with a dud called Lady in (troubled) Water; so much for the director extracting performances. With regards to Haley Joel Osment, no doubt that Shyamalan did a fantastic job with him but it could also be that Osment is a GOOD actor and some what a genius. This kid spoke to students at MIT for a good hour before Steven Speilberg joined him as they discussed robotics in a promotion for AI.
i do agree that The Happening has problems, holes in the logic, and other stuff. but i like it for the fact that Shyamalan always tries to tell more than just the surface story. that's terribly lacking in many of today's blockbuster/mainstream Hollywood movies.
as for acting, i have so far not seen a single bad acting in any of his films. (well, some say Shyamalan's own acting is bad, but i don't know.) they range from brilliant to good, for me.
I was going to make a comment about Shyamalan thinking about getting the surface story right before even trying to tell more than just the surface story but then I read your comment on the acting and I have to wonder if you even watched the movie. It is beyond me that you can even consider Walberg's, Deschanel's or Betty's Buckley's performances to be anywhere near good...
hi Garth,
i did say in my review that i regard the movie as a (intentional) comedy-thriller. i say the acting is intentionally goofy because this trait is consistent throughout and with different characters. i mean, look at the Plant Guy. also, Gomer Pyle who met them at the crossroads.
yeah, i was referring to my review posted a few entries back. at the preview, i noticed that the people who later said they liked the film were the ones who laughed the loudest. Betty Buckley's sudden burst of anger got the loudest laughs, btw.
Oh, no doubt the people who liked it the most were the ones who laughed loudest. I gave it five stars in my stupid facebook review because it was hilarious. I just don't buy the "intentional" comedy angle. Not when it was being sold as an r-rated horror movie, both by the ads and by the interviews I've read/heard with Shyamalan. Everything he's said has been his normal self-serious, pretentious BS about faith and hope and there's been no indication that he intended it to be a comedy.
So, like I said, see it as comedy if you will, I just don't buy that it was intentional at all.
I personally was not a fan of this movie. I felt the movie was trying to force a connection that just wasn't there.