The Happening

Behold the chilling and terrifying...wind? This was the moment and you know which one if you saw the movie where my mind finally just checked out of this boring movie. It doesn't matter how much blood letting you have done up to this point or how many times you have beaten your audience over the head with the unpredictable nature of...nature nor how much intentionally anxiety inducing music notes or how much you focus the camera on blowing blades of grass there is no terror in everyday wind. The Day After Tomorrow was a more scary eco-thriller than this (note to reader: said film was not scary, save that I actually paid to see it).

Our incredibly inane film begins in New York where some strange event induces often bloody suicides. These are more effective as shock factors than an real thrill or scare. Enter lowly high school science teacher Mark Wahlberg giving us all the exposition we need and with the ominous Einstein quote about bees and the survival of the human race. A quote which cannot actually be attributed to Einstein but none the less looks really neat as an innocuous background element. Wahlberg plays Elliot who when he learns of the event decides to join his friend in a trip to the country away from the cities where the "Happening" is seemingly taking place.

He is joined in this with a cast that is usually fairly solid (Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo) but uttering the dialogue they are given come off as flat one dimensional bores. The film veers away from any traditional notion of how people would react to unexplainable events for a more rational discourse which is about as exciting as it sounds. At key points we are informed in not very interesting exposition what is probably going on and yet at no point in this relatively short movie does it ever feel like I hadn't been in the theater for hours.

Beyond the abundance of wooden line readings there was an incessant repetition of the word "happening", driving me near mad with its recurrence. In the final act when the irrational humans show up its too little, too late. And in any event only seem to have been added because the director thought the whole the wind is scary motif might not be as effective as once thought. So rather than getting in satisfactory story we just get a few more punctuated unnecessary deaths.

To the film's credit, it was a thousand times less pretentious than Lady in the Water though still filled with enough to make you nauseous. The film also benefits from a complete lack of cameo of Mr. Shyamalan. Still those graces are hardly enough to counter the fact that Shyamalan is showing himself to be a mediocre film maker who got lucky a few times.