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As a reviewer, it can be difficult to know just how to rate a film. Should it be judged on the same scale as any other film, or on how well it achieves its aim? Should it be judged in a vacuum, or should it be compared to similar films? Unfortunately, it hardly matters how one judges The Happening. By any measure, it is an uninspired, listless effort.
The premise is simple: a neurotoxin has been released which causes people to suddenly kill themselves. This is briefly preceded by confusion, and then physical disorientation (which manifests itself as walking backwards). We see this play out from an omnipotent perspective, before shifting to the point of view of one Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), a science teacher who talks as if he's out of breath for the film's entire 91 minute runtime.
The opening scenes are jarring and would seem to set the stage for a taut thriller; an early scene at a construction site is particularly well-crafted. But the very nature of the threat undermines its attempts to scare. The events may be horrific to watch, but the effected people generally pose no danger to those around them; they only want to harm themselves, and are dead within a few seconds. Moreover, the signs which precede every death often telegraph what's going to happen before it does, undermining even the shock factor. The result of all this is that numerous scenes are tense, but few are frightening.
The effects of the toxin may make us cringe, but the way it works ensures that our fear will only go as far as our attachment to the characters. If we don't care about them enough, there's nothing to fear other than the occasional gross-out. And that is exactly what happens; the characters are odd and partially-developed, and it's difficult to care who survives the ordeal. Like them, we're only there to watch nameless characters bite the dust in unusual ways.
It's hard to pinpoint why we don't care; both the writing and the acting could be to blame. Wahlberg's work here has been much-maligned, but it's not clear whether or not he could have done much more with the lackluster dialogue writer/director M. Night Shyamalan has given him. John Leguizamo does the best job of the bunch, but can't rise above the quality of the source material. Zooey Deschanel's Alma Moore is interesting, but we don't learn enough about her, or any of the others. It often feels as if these characters have back stories and motivations that we never get to see. It's not that the characters are two-dimensional, so much as we're simply never shown the third.
Starker than any of these problems is how artless most of the production feels. Even Shyamalan's mediocre efforts like The Village have often featured moving scores and gorgeous photography. This time, everything feels rushed, as if simply getting the images on screen was the only priority.
The Happening stops short of a definitive explanation as to why everything's taking place, but dances around one explanation enough that the answer is obvious. Shyamalan has shown himself to be a gifted writer, but he has a penchant for clumsily shoving exposition into newscasts and random ancillary characters, which is on full display here. Lots of people speculate as to the cause of the film's events, but it's not hard to figure out which ones we're supposed to believe.
One of the film's few bright spots is the humor, which works even when it's wildly out of place. Shyamalan has a talent for absurd, widely accessible humor, but it works best when book ended by genuine thrills, rather than as a respite from the mundane.
What thrills there are largely come from a scene at an old woman's house near the end of the film. The sequence has its problems, but the dialogue takes a sharp turn for the better, and the whole production starts to feel the way we know Shyamalan's films can feel, even if only for a few minutes.
An early draft of The Happening (then under a different, more revealing title) found its way into many hands last year, and a quick read through it shows that it was once much bolder and more coherent. This film has deeper problems than a simple rewrite could possibly address, but once had the potential to be far more interesting. Somewhere between the page and the screen it became one of the worst versions of itself.
The premise is simple: a neurotoxin has been released which causes people to suddenly kill themselves. This is briefly preceded by confusion, and then physical disorientation (which manifests itself as walking backwards). We see this play out from an omnipotent perspective, before shifting to the point of view of one Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), a science teacher who talks as if he's out of breath for the film's entire 91 minute runtime.
The opening scenes are jarring and would seem to set the stage for a taut thriller; an early scene at a construction site is particularly well-crafted. But the very nature of the threat undermines its attempts to scare. The events may be horrific to watch, but the effected people generally pose no danger to those around them; they only want to harm themselves, and are dead within a few seconds. Moreover, the signs which precede every death often telegraph what's going to happen before it does, undermining even the shock factor. The result of all this is that numerous scenes are tense, but few are frightening.
The effects of the toxin may make us cringe, but the way it works ensures that our fear will only go as far as our attachment to the characters. If we don't care about them enough, there's nothing to fear other than the occasional gross-out. And that is exactly what happens; the characters are odd and partially-developed, and it's difficult to care who survives the ordeal. Like them, we're only there to watch nameless characters bite the dust in unusual ways.
It's hard to pinpoint why we don't care; both the writing and the acting could be to blame. Wahlberg's work here has been much-maligned, but it's not clear whether or not he could have done much more with the lackluster dialogue writer/director M. Night Shyamalan has given him. John Leguizamo does the best job of the bunch, but can't rise above the quality of the source material. Zooey Deschanel's Alma Moore is interesting, but we don't learn enough about her, or any of the others. It often feels as if these characters have back stories and motivations that we never get to see. It's not that the characters are two-dimensional, so much as we're simply never shown the third.
Starker than any of these problems is how artless most of the production feels. Even Shyamalan's mediocre efforts like The Village have often featured moving scores and gorgeous photography. This time, everything feels rushed, as if simply getting the images on screen was the only priority.
The Happening stops short of a definitive explanation as to why everything's taking place, but dances around one explanation enough that the answer is obvious. Shyamalan has shown himself to be a gifted writer, but he has a penchant for clumsily shoving exposition into newscasts and random ancillary characters, which is on full display here. Lots of people speculate as to the cause of the film's events, but it's not hard to figure out which ones we're supposed to believe.
One of the film's few bright spots is the humor, which works even when it's wildly out of place. Shyamalan has a talent for absurd, widely accessible humor, but it works best when book ended by genuine thrills, rather than as a respite from the mundane.
What thrills there are largely come from a scene at an old woman's house near the end of the film. The sequence has its problems, but the dialogue takes a sharp turn for the better, and the whole production starts to feel the way we know Shyamalan's films can feel, even if only for a few minutes.
An early draft of The Happening (then under a different, more revealing title) found its way into many hands last year, and a quick read through it shows that it was once much bolder and more coherent. This film has deeper problems than a simple rewrite could possibly address, but once had the potential to be far more interesting. Somewhere between the page and the screen it became one of the worst versions of itself.