Unhappening...

The Happening is somewhat of a test of M. Night Shyamalan. His last film, Lady in the Water, didn’t do so well, and his films before that mostly got by on the strength of his debut. People have really started to wonder if Shyamalan actually deserved his place in Hollywood. If people are basing their opinions solely on The Happening, then the answer is a resounding “no.”

One morning, people in Central Park suddenly start to behave rather strangely, resulting in quite a few deaths. In Philadelphia, Elliot is teaching his science class when they all get the news that Central Park may have been the target of a terrorist attack. People rush to leave the cities, all the while getting reports of more places being affected by the attack. We follow science teacher Elliot as he tries to figure out and escape the threat with his wife, Alma, who he’s recently been having some problems with, and his friend’s young daughter.

At times, while watching this film, I felt like a practical joke was being played on me. The concept is solid enough, and the central threat in this movie is one that is rarely explored. But the script isn’t really up to really fleshing out this threat, and it fails to at least make the threat consistent from scene to scene. Sometimes, when the threat reaches people, people die. Other times, people don’t die. At a couple of points in the film, a character speaks up and says that some things are acts of nature, and that we won’t ever understand them. This is just frustrating, lazy writing that we shouldn’t have to tolerate in this day and age. The characters are pretty weak altogether. Almost none of the characters talk like a normal person, and they all act pretty illogically. Besides that, the driving conflict between Elliot and Alma is just terribly weak.

Shyamalan’s filmmaking can be pretty off-putting. It feels like he’s trying a bit too hard in this one, giving his scenes a strange pace. To his credit, this approach leads to some very tense and effective horror and action sequences, but it also leads to a lot of clunky drama. Any scene with just two people talking feels a bit wrong. Tak Fujimoto’s cinematography feels a bit odd at points as well. There are a couple of sequences where it feels like the camera should have been in a completely different place.

This is a fairly strong cast, but the performances come off pretty weird, as well. Mark Wahlberg appears to have been told that teachers always talk like they’re talking to a class. Zooey Deschanel appears to have been instructed to simply act odd and confused all the time. John Leguizamo does well enough, comparatively, but he couldn’t save some of the film’s most terrible lines.

The Happening has a couple of good ideas, but ideas just don’t make a movie. You need a screenplay that does more than close its eyes and wish the plot holes away. While there are a couple of scenes in the movie that show a spark of imagination, the film mostly feels like a strangely pretentious and preachy B-movie. Given the level of talent associated with this film and its budget, that’s just unacceptable.