"The Happening"

I like M. Night Shyamalan. "The Sixth Sense" is a classic and has some of the most intense moments I've ever seen in a movie. His subsequent films have all exhibited some degree of clever premise, effective suspense, creepiness, and wonder. They've also exhibited degrees of contrived plot, really awkward human interaction, predictable unpredictability, and outright silliness.

But still, I'm glad he's making movies, and the kind of movies he makes are the kind of movies I like to see.

When I first heard about "The Happening", I was excited about it. I didn't know much, but I'd heard that the basic idea was that there was some sort of end of the world doomsday scenario that was wiping out large numbers of people. Cool.

Harry Knowles at Ain't It Cool News had a copy of the script and proclaimed "This has the potential to be the best film M Night has made."

Okay, good.

And then it came out, and the reviews were stunning in the degree of their condemnation.

Here are three quotes from the three reviews linked above:

"Jesus, God... What went wrong?"- Harry Knowles

"It is an astonishment, so idiotic in conception and inept in execution that, after seeing it, one almost wonders whether it was real or imagined."- Christopher Orr, The New Republic

"It's borderline unwatchable and raises the question of whether anyone will be satisfied with what the director has translated from script to screen."- James Berardinelli, ReelViews

Is "The Happening" that bad? Yes, it is.

Here is how it's bad:

While the basic premise is intriguing, the script is terrible. The plot is very weak. The specific course of actions that unfold is simply not very engrossing, and certainly not believable. Worse, the characters are lame and uninteresting. The bits of conflict and connection they share are contrived and so shallow when they purport to be meaningful. It just doesn't hold up.

The acting is terrible. And this is strange, because most of the actors in this film are quite good. But I have got to believe that Mark Wahlberg, John Leguizamo, and Zooey Deschanel (who I don't know that well) would conclude that this film showcases their worst performances ever. As actors, they certainly deserve some of the blame for this, but they are bad in such a strange way that it's pretty clear there are other factors contributing to these horrible performances.

The directing and editing is terrible. There's not much I can say specifically about this, except that the movie just doesn't feel properly structured, shot, blocked, etc. Film students can learn a lot about what a director's job is by observing the things that feel wrong about this movie.

So basically, every component fails, starting with the bedrock element (the script), continuing up through the performers, and ending with the person pulling the strings and gluing it all together.

That's the how.

As for the why... I have no idea.

There's no rational explanation I can think of that would make sense of a scenario where talented people got together and produced "The Happening". I guess I can chalk it up to the idea that there is magic involved in filmmaking. Great movies come together and are propelled to be better than their constituent parts by something intangible that is unique to the medium. I suppose "The Happening" is an example of that force acting malevolently.

It's like the evil mother who was poisoning her daughter in "The Sixth Sense" got hold of everyone involved with this movie and cursed them.