Movie Review: The Happening

The Happening
Rated R for violent and disturbing images
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Moral Rating: Average
Written, produced and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

M. Night Shyamalan has the ability to be a brilliant filmmaker. He understands how to appeal to the audience's emotions, he picks wonderful actors and spins suspense filled tales full of allegory and emotional content. Unfortunately, the latest tale from this brilliant director leaves me wanting something else. Why? The story.....

The Happening opens with an eerie apocalyptic scene in which people in Central Park suddenly stop what they are doing and begin committing suicide in random, disturbing ways. What is happening? A terrorist attack? Or the environment? That is the theory of high school science professor Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg). As he struggles to escape this bizarre happening with his distant wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) and his best friend Julian he has to find a way to keep from being targeted by this insane toxin.

As far as concepts go, this film comes across as being rather stupid. I felt like I was watching a horror version of An Inconvenient Truth. The film does not hide the fact that pollution and our lack of respect for the environment is what caused the plants to release this toxin and thus completely distances myself from becoming emotionally involved with the story. Is the message of saving our world supposed to really be "Don't pollute or the trees will make you ram a hair pin through your neck"? This is the major fault of the movie. This movie would have been immensely better if the toxin WAS actually a terrorist attack- something that audiences can relate to!

The acting in this movie was mediocre, as Shyamalan's scripts tend to do. (What the heck was that scene about the pharmacist supposed to mean?) If he gave his actors more space to do what they are payed for, it would have improved the movie much more.

Morally speaking, this was the first movie Night has made that received an R rating. Unfortunately, that means that he put excessively gory details into the movie just to satisfy his own experimentation. As people kill themselves we see the carnage in countless disturbing shots. One shot follows a gun as it travels through three hands, killing all three. Another shows construction workers hurtling off a roof to crash on the streets below. Yet another shows a man being chopped to bits by an industrial lawn mower. The director has lost his sense of good taste.

Language was minimal, and there was not any sexual content, but why did he have to put such pervasive violence in? I felt sick to my stomach as I watched two boys shot to death by paranoid rural home owners. This combined with a strange parable about global warming and pollution makes for a rather strange movie all together.

My verdict? Only see it if you like stuff like this. This film has style and is very well pieced together like Shyamalan's other films, but the left wing stupid allegory and severe bloody violence makes for an unhappy film experience that leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

Signing out, The Buckland Fiddler