The worst thing that can happen to a film giant is for him to start believing that he is indeed a film giant. The best example of this is the career of the great Alfred Hitchcock, the quality of whose films began to decline precisely after Truffaut and other French New Wave directors hailed him as a deity and a true film author.
A more recent example is M. Night Shyamalan, whose career can be summarised as an evolution from critics’ darling and "the new Hitchcock" to critics’ punching bag and "Hitchcock wannabe." His 2008 science fiction disaster film, The Happening, received scathing reviews from critics in a manner seldom seen for any mainstream Hollywood production, and even rarer for a work by an author who was praised as a great master just a few years earlier.
The film's plot employs the formula beloved by Hitchcock, and borrowed by Shyamalan, of the "ordinary man in an extraordinary situation." The situation faced by the protagonists is not only extraordinary but also deadly—people in New York have begun committing suicide for no apparent reason, and whatever is causing this effect starts spreading throughout the northeastern United States. Eliot Moore (played by Mark Wahlberg) is a high school biology teacher in Philadelphia who receives orders to evacuate his school. Initial explanations for the phenomenon mention a possible terrorist attack using biochemical weapons, so Moore, along with his wife Alma (played by Zooey Deschanel), colleague Julian (played by John Leguizamo), and Julian's young daughter Jess (played by Ashley Sanchez), seek refuge in the countryside. However, the deadly phenomenon spreads even to smaller towns, and Moore, trying to survive in the ensuing chaos, begins to realise that plants—specifically trees—may be defending themselves against humans by releasing a special neurotoxin.
Whenever a film is released with a universally poor reputation, one should be equally cautious as when it is universally praised. This applies to The Happening, which is not as bad as one might conclude based on the mauling by critics and less than stellar box office results.
The good news regarding The Happening can be summarised as follows: it is solidly directed as was to be expected from Shyamalan; he still knows how to create a disturbing atmosphere based on a few details; and it is an exceptionally short film.
This last point is actually the most important, as otherwise The Happening would have been completely unbearable. The main problem with Shyamalan's film is Shyamalan himself—specifically his script, which has ruined material from which many less talented and less pretentious filmmakers could likely have created a far superior film.
Given its "environmentally conscious" apocalyptic message about Mother Earth decisively defending herself against human intruders using humans’ innate aggression, The Happening could have counted on the sympathy of snobbish and predominantly left-wing critics. However, Shyamalan packaged all this into a rather cheap story about escape and survival while employing every possible cliché of the disaster genre. What is most important for the success of such a film—the characters who might engage the audience and whose fate they could become invested in—are absent.
This absence can also be attributed to poor casting. Mark Wahlberg is hard to imagine as a high school teacher, while Zooey Deschanel appears even more insipid; for much of the film she merely drags along like a sack of stones and mostly stares blankly at the camera. It is almost impossible to connect her character with the talented comedienne who once swept the floor with Jennifer Aniston in The Good Girl. To all this must be added a nonsensical "psychological" horror subplot featuring a crazy old woman, as well as a pathetic deus ex machina ending.
Another missed opportunity were the suicides themselves, where Shyamalan demonstrated an obvious lack of appreciation for dark humour compared to his illustrious predecessor. The scenes depicting mass suicides are presented in a routine, mechanical manner and evoke more yawns than shock from viewers.
What can be seen in The Happening is that Shyamalan increasingly struggles to cope with losing his status as a Hollywood deity. The poor reviews of The Village received an answer in introducing an unsympathetic film critic character in The Lady in the Water; likewise, it seems that audiences who abandoned him—or failed to understand his artistry—don’t deserve anything better. The punishment for ungrateful humanity that fails to appreciate Shyamalan's greatness, and as such unworthy of existence, is precisely that final solution which another misunderstood artist and protector of nature once prescribed for solving similar problems.
RATING: 3/10 (+)
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