The Happening
starring Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo and Betty Buckley
written and directed by M. Night
Rating: ♦
I wish that Mark Wahlberg would stop making movies. They’re all crap. In fact, I wish that M. Night Shyamalan would stop making movies, too. They’re mostly crap. The Sixth Sense (with Bruce Willis) was okay. But The Village (William Hurt) was a total let down, Signs (Mel Gisbon), was positively boring, and Unbreakable (Samuel Jackson) was annoyingly nonsensical. I’ve watched four or five Shyamalan films now and “let down,” “bored,” and “annoyed” are the best words to describe my reaction to them. But I was so willing to give The Happening a chance that instead of renting it I bought the DVD for myself. (Mistake!) Based on trailers I saw on other DVDs I hoped that it would be an exciting, scary medical/scientific suspense/thriller like The Andromeda Strain, or I Am Legend. It should have been, but it wasn’t.
The Happening is a story about a deadly virus raging through the eastern United States in a one day period. It could have been thrilling End-of-the-world stuff, but Shyamalan decided to reign in the devastation to a strict, limited time frame. And, the manner of human deaths could have been/should have been a lot scarier. The premise that the chemical agent - released by plants as a defense mechanism against humans - indirectly kills humans not just by depressing our self-preservation intuition but by actively driving us to suicide is unconvincing. Indeed, this is a blatant flaw in the deadly premise because the idea that human beings minus a sense of self preservation will actively self-destruct as a direct consequence is a non-sequitur. There are a couple logical steps missing from that idea. I’m just an amateur, but even I can imagine at least a couple other things we might do, or that might happen to us without a sense of self preservation (or with a diminished or damaged sense) besides immediate suicide. How about simply living recklessly?