The Happening

T

Thunderhoof

250+ Posts
Wife and I just got back from seeing this. We enjoyed it, but I am 100% positive that lots of people will hate it. So basically it's the same as every other Shyamalimadingdong movie since The Sixth Sense.

Before we went to the movie, I read a review that basically said that you had seen the whole movie if you have seen any of the trailers. That's not true, but you certainly would have seen some of the spookier moments. Without giving anything away, I think you will enjoy this movie if you don't require the best movie on earth in order to enjoy it for what it is. That may have been the point of Shyamalan coming right out yesterday and calling this a "B" movie.

I like Marky Mark as an actor. I think that John Leguizamo is better by far in this particular movie, but that's alright. I don't really like the female lead, Zooey Deschanel, and I think she has a weird name.

Anytime a Shyamalan thread comes up on here, people inevitably end up ranking the current project in relation to previous ones. For me, I put this one ahead of both The Lady in the Water and The Village. I liked 6th Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs better than this one.

I will say this: visually, I really like a lot of things that Shyamalan does in his movies. The Happening is no different. Stark, beautiful, memorable scenes from a strictly visual viewpoint.

Hopefully this is not too much of a spoiler, but this movie is War of the Worlds without aliens.
 
Say what you want about his screenwriting and/or plot ideas since Sixth Sense, but his ability to create mood with the camera is up there with the best of them.

I have liked all of his films except "Lady". That one sucked big time.
 
I loved it! The scariest scenes didn't involve the blood/guts bit (which is why the THIS IS HIS FIRST R RATE MOVIE spill is so stupid). It's the tried and true creaking of the door, the shadow that moved, etc

I'm in love with both Deschanel sisters.
 
How can anybody have liked this movie? It really is beyond me. I can understand having a difference of opinion on The Villiage (I liked it a lot) or Signs (I didn't like it), but this was genuinely terrible.




************ SPOILERS ******************

Seriously--you have some ****** character development when I really don't give a **** whether your characters die or not. I for one am particularly disturbed by suicide, having had friends kill themselves. But I genuinely found myself thinking "kill yourself, don't kill yourself--see if I care." And they did, and I didn't.

Take, for instance, John Leguizamo, who is a pretty important character in the film. Did anybody really care when he died? Hell, half of my theater laughed at that car wreck. They also laughed at the lion scene and the lawnmower scene. Not because the director intended those to be funny, but because they were so dumb and so poorly done.

Compare this movie with The Devil's Advocate, which, admittedly, is not a particularly good movie. But the scene in which Charlize Theron kills herself is seriously disturbing. Compare that with any suicide scene in this film, and it's just horrifying in its ineptitude.

I'm not even going to go into the message, because I was so beaten over the head with it I just can't stand to discuss it any further. Suffice it to say that it is hard to have a message that tries to be deep, and yet ends up being so damned shallow.

********* END SPOILERS **************





Perhaps it would be one thing if there was something particularly artistic about it, or if the acting was particularly good. But it just wasn't. It was bad, in every sense of the word.
 
I'm pretty much with LonghornLawyer on this one. I will defend Signs and The Village to my death -- I loved both.
This one, however, not so much.

***Spoiler***







Having really never been personally affected by suicide, that aspect of the movie didn't bother me as much. What I hated was the idea of what was causing the "happening."

I was also disappointed that there was no twist. Also, it seemed as if the movie had a bunch of loose ends that were going to be tied up at the end ala Signs. That didn't happen either.

I half expected M. Night to show up at the end of the movie with a "Go Green" placard.
 
It pretty much is a Michael Moore horror story. A bad one at that...

****Spoiler****










Apparently plants can communicate with each other and release targeted attacks on humans. If we don't stop harming the environment, it could happen to us. Though, I would think that plants would have "attacked" us long ago seeing as how we eat them all the time.
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One of the most overrated filmmakers in my opinion. The Sixth Sense was a very good film and Signs was rent worthy, but the rest of his work has been a disappointment - artistically and at the box office.
 
I'm with LL too... the movie sucked... the acting was beyond horrible... it's not even B-movie bad, which might have been enjoyable...
 
The guy needs to quit writing and just direct. He's in a steady rate of decline as a writer, but is still an excellent director. Each film is worse than the last. 6th Sense, excellent. Unbreakable, good. Signs, okay. The Village, watchable. Lady in the Water, garbage. The Happening, even worse garbage. But the directing is still solid in each. The stories are just garbage.
 
I liked the "sixth sense" but there was a similar movie released about the same time called "Stir of Echos" that I enjoyed more than that. "Signs" ranks at the top for me followed by "The Village." In my latest overall poll I ranked "Clueless" ahead of "Lady in the Water."
 
I didn't care for the movie either. Way to cliché.

*****SPOILERS**********************



REF: The scene where John Leguizamo is looking over his shoulder in the jeep at his daughter.

This is a great example of a crappy director call. There was no need to slow-mo that scene. That disrespects the audience by saying "Hey everybody - this guy is going to die soon - this scene is real important".

The two tween boys were ridiculous. They come out of nowhere just to act as vehicles for another gory death. “I know – let’s put two chubby kids in the plot to be our foils! That’s so original!” I thought the actions of the kids were unbelievable. They don't care about their families, and the white kid's acting was horrible.
 
Even if you hate Michael Moore, you do him a disservice by saying this is a Michael Moore horror story. The Day after Tomorrow is a Michael Moore horror story. The Happening is a 4th grader who likes the environment horror story.
 
What did you not like about The Village.

Signs had some problems. The Happening was downright horrible. But I really don't understand peoples' problems with The Village.
 
Well, let's pretend for a minute that I never started this thread by saying that this was an enjoyable B movie, LL, and I'll answer your question about The Village
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First, I only saw The Village once (in the theatre when it came out). I liked The 6th Sense, and I also really liked Signs. The problem many people had with Signs was the total improbability (mentioned above) that the aliens would be so surprised by their own vulnerability to water when they landed on a planet that's 70% water. I had no real issue with the water thing, because I saw the Aliens as a plot vehicle -- nothing more. Signs, to me, was all about Mel Gibson's character and dealing with the love for his family and the loss of his faith as a result of the death of his wife. It's not an alien movie at all. If it were, the aliens might have gotten more than 5 minutes of screen time.

But I digress. I enjoy history very much. I also do a lot of manual labor as part of my job. The Village bothered me because I found it totally improbable, to the point of absurdity, that these peoples' children found the world they were living in to be realistic at all. Do you have any idea what it would take to make an idyllic village, like that one, out in the wilderness? There weren't enough people in that village to practice half of the trades necessary to make it happen. What do they do when someone breaks a window? How do they acquire more iron for horseshoes? Land seemed to be an issue, as in there wasn't enough cleared space for the amount of crops that they would have needed to grow.

EDIT: I forgot to mention this. The fact that there are aliens in a movie makes me automatically suspend my disbelief. Having done so, I could enjoy the rest of the movie. In Signs, suspension of disbelief came BEFORE the improbable ending, making it more acceptable to me. In The Village, the whole thing is a mystery until the end. I didn't have to suspend my disbelief, because the whole thing could have been explained by a supernatural series of events. Since I never had to suspend my disbelief, the ending was a total letdown since the "explanation" was so utterly improbable to me.

These are just a few of the things that I remember specifically thinking about that movie. Perhaps I should give it another chance. I will tell you one thing -- The Village lowered forever my expectations of Shyamalan's movies. I still think that they are well shot, and I agree entirely with the poster who said that he should start sticking to directing and give up on the whole "I am the next Hitchcock" idea.
 
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