The Happening

As it happens, I went to see The Happening today. I mentioned my excitement for this film, hoping that Shyamalan would manage to break his 'slump' of bad movies.

I hate to say that I was disappointed, but I was. There were several elements about the film I was excited to see, and over all they just fell short.

The first was the 'R' rating, which was touted in a majority of the commercials. I won't say that there wasn't a reasonable amount of gore, which is certainly a departure from his previous work. It wasn't exactly worth noting, though, it just became a gimmick to try and boost sales, and really should have just stood on their own.

I had great hope in that the movie featured both Mark Wahlberg and John Leguizamo, who are both underrated actors in my opinion. The problem is that Shyamalan seems to have taken one of the most obnoxious components of Lady in the Water, and applied it to this film, and that's the terrible acting. It's hard to believe that he would do this intentionally, but the fact that the actors in this film are actually decent, I can only assume that he sat there through cut after cut with his megaphone saying, "No, worse, please, act worse!"

Finally, I was hoping that there would be a solid twist in this story, as he always wants to try and switch things around on you at the end of every one of his films. In this case, there really was no twist. Instead, there was an underlying message, which unfortunately doesn't lie under anything, but is actually spelled out vividly and plainly, as though people aren't capable of figuring out what he was trying to say. If you want to save yourself nearly two hours, I'll sum it up, "people are hurting the environment, soon the environment might fight back."

A good story teller should be able to deliver their message with the story, not with blatant exposition. Instead, when the story is over, we're treated to another of many newscasts where an 'expert' not only tells us what we should have already figured out, but then tells us exactly what that's supposed to mean.

There was one other subtle piece to the film that just irked me. He's apparently been attached to a three film live action project of 'Avatar: The Last Airbender, Nickelodeon's feux-anime cartoon. I personally love the series, and being an established story, I can only hope he could pull it off. Now, here we are a year later, and we've heard virtually nothing else about it, yet he felt the need to show off the story when the young character, Jess, is wearing an 'Avatar' back pack in one of the final scenes of the film.

Overall I'm very disappointed, not only with the fact that Shyamalan seems to have become incapable of producing anything worth watching, but also with the fact that Hollywood is still willing to give him money to create this garbage. Of his mainstream films, he's now 3 and 3, with his first three being solid films, and last 3 being much less than stellar. It's a terrible streak.

Admittedly, this film was better than Lady in the Water by leaps and bounds, but that's not difficult. Meanwhile, the Village wasn't so much bad as just badly done with a 'twist' that made the majority of movie-goers groan when they realized it in the first act, and this movie failed to deliver any sort of 'twist' at all, and this is especially despicable considering that it's his trademark.

Do I recommend seeing this movie? No. Simple as that. If you took people's advice and avoided Lady in the Water, I would encourage you to do the same with this.