The Happening
ALRIGHT, I COULD go on and on about why I love M. Night Shyamalan but, regretfully, I went and saw his newest progression in the art of film making early Saturday afternoon. The Happening is the story of Elliot Moore, a high school science teacher with an estranged girlfriend who is forced to head west by whatever means available to escape a mysterious "virus" that is spreading through Northeastern America, causing people to kill themselves in some of the most creative ways possible.
I'll start off by saying, once again, how much I love M. Night's story telling; his ability to create suspense out of thin air and the almost childish ways in which he lets us view his world. He's had his downfalls -- as all good story tellers do -- but in the end there should really be no doubt in the creativity he can weave through his films.
The problem is...I think M. Night knows this. And, no matter how much I love him, when I see characters sprinting through an empty field literally trying to outrun the wind, I have to stop and think about what I'm watching and what the writer/director is expecting me to think and feel.
The acting style is uniquely Shyamalan, so Wahlberg's character ends up acting the same as Bruce Willis' in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable and Mel Gibson's in Signs. In the end, they are really the same characters, just placed into different situations. They are the classic story archetypes that have been used for generations: the doctor, the everyman, the preacher, the teacher. In the end, when making a thriller of Hitchcockian proportions, we need to be with characters we believe exist, not that we understand have been created to show us something in a theatrical setting.
Let me finish by saying that The Happening isn't a bad movie. It actually does keep you rather interested with a short screen time studded with some gorey, if not superfluous and slightly ridiculous, images of suicide that stretch the movie to a seemingly promotional "R" rating. I just wish that, considering the title -- and from a director so plot-driven and creative -- something had actually, well, happened. No wonder the characters look bored out of their minds.
THE OVERMAN'S GRADE
::: C- :::
Disappointing
::: C- :::
Disappointing
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