The Happening, or: What the hell just happened?
THE HAPPENING
- Director/Writer: M. Night Shyamalan / M. Night Shyamalan
- Release Date: 11 June 2008
- Plot outline: A paranoid thriller about people on the run in a natural crisis that presents a large-scale threat to humanity.
- Freebase entry.
[UPDATE] See the conclusion in the comments below.
And now for a look at science fiction: I watched Shyamalan’s The Happening last night and, you know, this may have just been the most interesting movie this year. No really: simply because I can’t wrap my head around it. What the hell was that? Why the bad acting, why the goofy protagonist? Is there a puzzle in there somewhere? Read on for a brief rant.
Mark Wahlberg admittedly has his good sides when he has a gun, is on the run and shoots his co-actors on sight. But here he was simply a horrible actor. Horrible. And it wasn’t only him-there were other horrible scenes.
I honestly think Shyamalan made them act bad on purpose.
There’s no question that Shyamalan knows how to direct, we’ve seen that in his previous films. We also know that he can be brilliant and can tailor elaborate plots supported by logical ideas (e.g. Unbreakable). But The Happening? For the life of me I cannot trace what he was thinking.
The likeliest thing I can imagine is that he was going for some kind of old-school horror film style. There is the piano music which supports that, but still, how does that tie in with the notion of seemingly harmless natural things being able to fight back
Is there some meaning in the odd combination of characters plus bad acting? Or was he inspired by the Global Warming issue and in his craze to point out our stupidity threw together a film in haste?
I’m going to watch it again.
Just wondering.
2 Comments, Comment or Ping
Stephen
Yes after watching this movie I thought “That was horrible” but then I thought of something else. I looked at a couple other things (blogs reviews etc.) and they had the same idea. Is this movie about doom to ourselves and procreation. How about abortion does that play in this bad movie. I don’t know. Maybe someone out there can reveal something on this concept maybe I’m just showing something thats not even relevant to this move.
Jul 15th, 2008
Hrafn
Your comment enticed me to have a look at some reviews, and unfortunately I think io9 has the scoop — it was an anti-evolution, a religion based film.
I noticed the hints, like Wahlberg saying evolution was “just a theory”. But like I said above, I didn’t realize how everything tied in with harmless things using distributed intelligence against us — I was assuming that he was going for a scientific explanation and intended to simply point out the youth of science and humanities frailty.
But then hearing this, I think we can quite safely assume he was trying to express his religion about there being things that science can’t grasp, like Wahlberg said in there somewhere as well. It was staring me in the face. The hook and plot thereby argue that there is something supernatural at work in the world simply because we haven’t explained them yet, and the tie-in script-wise is providing no explanation for the movie’s “happenings”. Sigh.
That is an extremely disappointing realization. The movie was bad after all, and beyond. Thank you for your vigilance, io9.
Jul 17th, 2008
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