The Happening

So, as part of my summer movie binging, over the past two weeks, I saw Iron Man for my 3rd time, You Don't Mess with the Zohan (which just barely deserves to be mentioned), The Happening, and The Incredible Hulk. For the moment, let's dive into The Happening, and hopefully we'll return to the Hulk on a day sometime in the near future. By necessity, this discussion will include spoilers for the movie, so if you feel like you still want to see it and don't want anything ruined (which, before you get started, I would recommend you read this, just because the main spoiler can change your mind about paying 8 bucks to see this).

The movie starts out quite intriguingly, with people all over Central Park randomly committing suicide. It's a great start to the movie and gets you really excited about finding out what is happening to everyone. The problem is that from there, everything starts to go downhill and never really picks itself back up.

You see, when faced with an unknown attacker that can kill people without you ever seeing, it can be genuinely freaky. This allows the first 30 minutes of the movie to be quite good (aside from the characters/writing, but more on that later). However, after those 30 minutes, you hear the "theory" as to what is causing this. Now, it would have been fine if there were multiple theories proposed to bring in a sort of guessing game as to what is happening, but M. Night doesn't do that. He gives you a crazy guy who puts forth a theory that is never really argued with and winds up being true (which makes sense, since nothing is ever brought up to the contrary).

The problem with this, is that "the happening" is caused by... are you ready? Plants. Yes, plants. The plants are mad at humans for being so evil and they decide to release toxins into the air to protect them from us, and these toxins force humans to kill themselves. So, what I was hoping to be an initial alien invasion (that was my hope from the previews and such), turns out to be a big political statement about us treating the environment better so that it doesn't get pissed off and kill us all off using airborne toxins.

This leaves the suspense in the movie to our main characters running from.... the wind. There is seriously a scene in the movie that focuses on the wind rustling through tree branches and tall grass, while ominous music plays loudly and the characters are forced to run ahead of the wind. Yeah, it's dumb.

But, the problems don't really end with the plot. I could have forgiven the plot if the characters were good, but they were all wooden, one-dimensional pieces. Marky Mark is a good actor, Zooey Deschanel is a good actor, John Leguizamo is a good actor.... but when they aren't given a good script, every time they talk on screen is annoying. Zooey's character in particular bothered the crap out of me, because there really was no point for her and Marky Mark to be fighting, and yet their marriage is "on the rocks," without any real explanation, and what we do wind up seeing, could have been written by a middle schooler with dating problems. Sorry, that sentence wasn't structured very well. Anyway, it leaves the whole movie feeling very empty character-wise and since I found no true depth or real emotion to any of the main characters, it made it all that much harder to empathize and try to pay attention to their problems.

My final gripe with the movie lies with the "R" rating. The commercials all hype up the fact that this is M. Night's first "R" film, and yes this cut should be rated "R" for the violence that is shown, but I honestly think they should have stayed at PG-13 because after the initial death scenes, the later gore in the movie is just violence for the sake of violence. In my opinion, I found the deaths that happened off screen to be far more chilling than the random deaths that get shown. There is a point in the movie where you just hear gunshots, and you know that all of the members of a group are picking up a gun and committing suicide, but you never have to see any of it, and the silence followed by a loud pop followed again by silence, actually gave me goosebumps. Whereas, another part of the movie, a guy walks up to a riding lawnmower and then lays in front of it in order to kill himself nearly made me laugh out loud. I can understand that they were trying to go for a more hardcore suspense/horror audience, but when the script just puts in these moments so that they can show off violence and gore, it just doesn't do it for me.

So, to put all of this together, The Happening was a huge disappointment for me. I went in hoping for M. Night to climb back into good graces after the problems of Lady in the Water, but he just didn't make it. Although, I'll give him credit... there was no huge twist in the movie.