Global Harming

So barely a month after it's initial release, M. Night Shyamalan's latest, The Happening is already at the budget theater (ouch!). Despite it's poor box office performance, I've been a fan of his previous work (sans The Lady in the Water) so I decided to check it out.

My experience watching it? In a word...painful. And while some of that is attributable to the film, a lot of the pain unfortunately came from an unrelated experience. Before the film began, a couple of different people in the theater claimed they saw a rat scurrying around on the floor. I never saw the thing personally, but if it did exist, I wasn't about to let it brush up against me or even bite me. So I ended up having to watch the film with my legs propped up and wedged between the two seats in front of me. Thank goodness the movie only lasted 90 minutes; there's no way I could have lasted like that through The Dark Knight.

Anyways, onto the movie...the film's premise revolves around a bizarre occurance in Central Park that has caused everyone there to become disoriented and eventually commit suicide. Soon, these occurances are happening more frequently throughout the east coast. Nobody knows what's causing this; whether it be some kind of terrorist attack or the plants of the world evolving and distributing this poison into the air as a defense mechanism. The only cue in the film to indicate the virus is approaching is the sound of the wind blowing. In terms of scare tactics, that ranks pretty low on the fright-o-meter.

In fact very little in this film seemed genuinely scary, despite this being Shymalan's first R rated film. Based on the audience's reaction, you would have thought this was a comedy rather than a horror/thriller. At the times that the audience did give a frightened reaction, it seemed more obligatory rather than genuine. This is a steep decline from Shymalan's first feature, The Sixth Sense. This director started off by making films that had that great combination of engaging story with legitimate scares. He soon downgraded with films like The Village to having still a decent story, but the thrills became more hokey. Now with this movie, he seems so consumed with a specific vision for his work that he doesn't stop to think whether either the story or the scares click.

Shymalan's tunnel vision certainly prevented him from helping direct the primary actors of the film. The main characters are Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel as a couple who's relationship has been on the rocks lately. But the actor seem more seperate than the characters they are portraying. There's no emotion or realism behind what they are saying to each other. During the intended deep moments of the film, everything remains artificial thanks to their poor acting.

John Leguizamo is also in this film as a friend/co-worker of Wahlberg's, but his character is only in the first half of the film and doesn't receive proper closure as to why he's never seen again. Instead, the second half of the film features a bizarre appearance by Betty Buckley as a woman who's lived in the woods away from civilization for some time. Her character does deliver some legitimate creepy moments, but her presence seems unrelated to the rest of film.

If the cheesiness factor from the acting wasn't enough, the visual effects in this film are equally as bad. It would be one thing if they just came off as computer generated, but it's worse than that. There's a scene with a lion mauling someone that's been affected by this virus and the scene looks like it belongs in a Sci-Fi channel made for TV movie. Shymalan needed to show the restraint he had in his previous films at letting the unseen be just as terrifying as the seen. Think back to Signs and how scary just that brief shot of the alien was. The added gore in this film just reeks of desperation. It's as if the studio felt the story wasn't strong enough, so they added more blood and guts in order to earn an R rating and generate a bit more interest.

I think what's ultimately most disappointing is the film's lack of purpose. I have no problem with a lack of proper explanation for how and why this event occured. That is fine and can spur debate amongst readers. What I do have a problem with is that we get no sense as to why we needed to revolve the story around Mark Wahlberg's character. With Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable and Mel Gibson in Signs, the main characters had to go through some personal journey that was somehow related to the supernatural events that surrounded the film. With Wahlberg's character, we never get that sense of his connection to these events, nor do we really see any growth in him as a human being. And any developments made in his relationship with Deschanel's character are undercut by the film's coda. I would have much rather seen him use this same freaky occurance and frame it from a broader approach to see how Americans at a whole react to this. There are glimpses of that here, but just as it seems to head in that direction, it heads back to the aimless wanderings of milqutoast Wahlberg.

If you've never been a fan of Shymalan's work, I see no reason to recommend this film to you. If you have been a fan, this may be worth a rental, if for no other reason than comparative purposes. While sad, I still think it's interesting to see the decline in the quality of his work. Maybe if his fans can continue to point out where he's gone wrong, there can be hope that the ship can be corrected. Then again, if the stories about his ego and stubbornness are true, we may never see another decent film from him. That would be really a shame. His failure to produce another successful film may end up being as mysterious as the events of The Happening. Grade: C-