The Happening Review
The Happening ReviewStarring: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Year: 2008
This is the part where I try to summarize a movie, and a movie where the summarization is "and then people start murdering themselves all over the place,” can be kind of tricky. Anyway, M. Night Shyamalan brings another movie, and the typical M. Night Shyamalan bullshit is there. Not that this is terrible, like all his movies there is this great potential for the movie. And I think Shyamalan should master simpler movies before trying to tackle bigger movies. (thank you for murdering an awesome show by the way) And this compared to some other movies, is simpler, and it’s better than the Lady in the Water, which I’ve already reviewed, but not as good as Signs, which got a high seven from me. And I think Shyamalan is a good storyteller on paper, he’s a good idealist. Aside from maybe understanding how character and character development. But this, like all his other movies he’s written, should have an entirely new script. The scenes are all awkward or forced as fuck, and when you have the music and camera acting like they’re saying the most epic or dramatic thing of all time, it just doesn’t work. Seriously, the camera needs to not zoom in so much on these people’s faces. And another reason besides why Shyamalan shouldn’t be on the script besides the awkward dialogue, is the characters are always dull, and this is no exception. In a dark intense movie, nobody will want to keep coming back to the movie if it’s depressing. So that’s when you bring enjoyable characters, and characters that are interesting. None of them are there. These movies have all the materials, good actors, good idea, they can be good. Anyway, enough of a rant part, how is the movie? It’s about a mysterious event where basically yeah, people are killing themselves at random, and you obviously can’t ask a dead person why they did it. So is it something chemical, a terrorist attack, a nuclear power plant leak, what is it? And there is this good sense of paranoia and wondering just what is going on. And then there is the best part of the movie, the part that probably saves it from being a bad movie. It’s intense, and pulls into these dark and yet bone chilling moments. When these people are just nonchalantly jumping off of buildings, or shooting themselves, it just really is intense to watch. And then on top of that you have the world going to shit on top of things. Literally, there are children getting shot in the brain in this movie, and if that doesn’t deserve a rated R rating and make this a dark movie, I don’t know what is. And I will say there is one thing that Shyamalan does correctly is add this bigger sense of something. Like Signs dipped into religion, and that had a much bigger affect. And this plays off of who is the victim, and who is the villain. And the big theory that’s the unofficial thing killing people is plants, and that they’re sending a chemical to kill people, like they how they send wasps to kill caterpillars. And in this it states humans are a threat to the world at this point, and the world fought back. And we as human beings always think we can’t really die, and we’ll always find a way. And this throws those rules out the window, and human life is discarded. That stops this from being a bad movie, despite the stupid script and laughable scenes. Do I look at this movie positively, yes I do pretty much every movie that doesn’t earn the badge of shit. But it still has many flaws, but still has that golden potential. But it still isn’t really that good, unfortunately. I tried, I really did.
The Happening gets a 3/5
Spoilers: Ah, the very end anyone? Did that count as a twist ending? But wait, how did the plants come closer in this movie to killing us than the aliens in Signs? Really, plants are stronger than aliens on food chain? Okay...
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