The Happening

It is one of the scariest plots I have come across. But wait. It’s the concept underscored by the plot that’s brilliant. Let me explain. The movie is terrific in the initial moments. People kill themselves for apparently nothing. They appear to have lost the instinct of survival. They no longer care to live. We witness the physical change, a backward pedaling, and then a mental computation to self-destroy. The multiplicity of self-inflicted damage is unfathomable to any rational mind. It is scary because suicide-bombers have no sense of self-preservation; it is scary because to the nucleus of any surviving species is the instinct to endure; it is scary because not even zombies execute themselves without chasing a purpose.

Now, the plot of the movie and the entire development of it is a routinely increment of bizarre and bloody suicides. Theme soars too high only to plummet to a regrettable end. The movie attempts to hint into a political issue that Al Gore pointed to without forcing the viewers to witness people plunging from building, bashing windows with they eyes, driving at suicidal speeds into trees, shooting themselves, and laying flat under a tractor to be chopped by the blade. The painful cringes are not worth the reward. Nonetheless, the idea of loosing the most primal of instincts is terrifying. To measure the movie, I also take into account the hilarity of seeing Mark Whalberg helplessness against an old woman thumping walls with her forehead. Whalberg tries to portray the harmless school teacher Elliot Moore, but all he wants is to clobber the insolent and punch something, anything. You can see it in his eyes. M. Night Shyamalan tames him to the point where he talks to a plastic plant.

With flaky characters crammed into the plot, like the hot-dog loving hippie couple who are convinced the plants are the problem or the flummoxed army soldier who has low potential of surviving any type of movie genre, the film moves forward tragically just as the deathly disease beleaguering the characters in the bleak Pennsylvanian landscape. M. Night Shyamalan always manages to tune into something unexpectedly petrifying but sadly his forte is thematic editing and superior story-telling. He has no sense of photography or creative visuals, he is bereft of any coherent social, least political, comment and he is not one to make a movie without a precise intention. Since he has nothing else but the power to sway the paranormal on the screen, like agitating the creeps of the viewers, when he fails, he fails as dramatically as any uni-talented director. This is that movie, a movie where he falls. He is marvelous in the initial ten minutes but after that he disappoints at the only thing he excelled for about eighty minutes.

The story hangs loosely from threads that lose their strength as the movie progresses. The climax of the movie is the introduction, while the remainder is a predictable deceleration of suspense until the deplorable end. If I tweak a few things the film could be grand. For example, ending with the death of the main characters would have demonstrated the inevitability of an outbreak of the degree portrayed. It would have also donated some logic to the stream of illogical and dishonest decisions by the characters in an effort to save the plot. I sincerely hope that in the interior of an inventive mind this horrifying theme is revisited and presented to the audience as it should be: the most frightening side-effect of all.