20th Century Fox, 2008. Written and Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Starring Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, and Ashlyn Sanchez.
Whoever told M. Night Shyamalan that it's acceptable to write a story without justifying the key elements of the plot? That's exactly what he does in The Happening: he proposes an interesting idea (people who, for some unknown reason, are drawn to killing themselves), but the idea never gets anywhere. The movie never explains the reasons why this happens, but rather prefers to leave it up to our own imagination: perhaps it's terrorism, or air pollution, or an evil coincidence, or maybe a combination of all of these. Nothing really happens in the movie, and everything seems to come out of the blue.
If you're hoping to see a well-developed film, with a beginning, a middle, and an ending, this is not the one for you. We went to see it at the theater and came out of the room with the feeling that we'd been swindled by the story. Its premises are interesting, but the possibilities that these premises offer are totally wasted away. That's not to say that Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel don't do a good job: they are good actors, but they are stuck in a story that is not only unbelievable, but that actually makes no attempt at verisimilitude. In our opinion, The Sixth Sense (1999) is undoubtedly Shyamalan's best work, and The Happening is a clear example that either he's run out of ideas or he's become a little lazy at screenplay writing.
Anton&Erin.
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