And then didn’t name Girl after a Disney princess, like her mother wanted. What a bitch.
Oh I understood the “reasoning” I just didn’t find it all that believable.
To me it was Night of the Living Dead (1968) but with flying suicide monsters instead of zombies. Almost exactly the same dynamic and characters inside the house. I kind of wish the ending had been more similar, actually.
Despite all of the logical and logistical ridiculousness (One character early on says, “We don’t even know how long we’ll have electricity!” Five years later, they still have electricity), I did think it was pretty well-made and worth a couple hours of couch time. I just felt as if I’d seen it all before.
[spoiler]I find it really hard to believe that she’d be able to find a rowboat and get it into the water all by her blind lonesome.
Also, what was the deal with the whole “you gotta sacrifice one kid” dilemma? What happened to make that unnecessary? They screwed the pooch on that one.
I knew Lil Rel wasn’t long for the world. An emotional pleasantly plump black guy isn’t destined for a long life in horror movies. But I like the nerdy but helpful characters he always seems to play, so his presence was a plus for me. However, I hated that the fat chick was not only cloyingly sweet but so dumb that she was the cause of almost everyone’s demise. I long for the day when the fat chick gets to be the kick-ass heroine who survives at the end.
I thought it was way too pat to have her doctor show up at the school.
I can go along with a supernatural monster that only gets you when you see it. But a supernatural monster that can’t manage to creep into the ventilation system or slide down the chimney? Yet it can make the wind blow?[/spoiler]
GF wanted to watch it. We did. It didnt do much for either of us. Kinda slow in a few spots. Kinda dumb in a lot more. Zombie/vampire/invisible suicide ghost poxy clips movies are hard to do well. That’s why there is such a tiny handful of them. There’d be more if 99% of them weren’t Night of the Living Dead retreads.
monstro - Maybe the monsters were also pleasantly plump. Also looking forward to Amy Schumer or Melissa McCarthy making a kick ass horror movie.
Redlettermedia mockingly deconstructed it and now I feel uncompelled to see it.
Of course, I only know about this movie because of the alert I got from redlettermedia itself, so no big deal.
I don’t usually watch horror, so I can’t compare this with better examples of the sub-genre, though I’ve seen The Mist which I hated.
I liked this. I think it’s the performances that carry it, and they were all excellent. Nobody felt unrealistic or unmotivated, even the bad guys. Some things were left unexplained, but I kind of pieced together justifications for them on my own.
Just finished it.
The concept leads inevitably to a difficult plot logic problem: if seeing the Things causes you to die, how do the survivors know that? Which they resolved, in the first scene inside the house, with a huge amount of hand-waving, prodigious leaps of reasoning, and they might as well have just lowered a god from the ceiling to explain the rules. (Speaking of which … who told Theseus that looking at Medusa would turn you to stone?)
In hindsight (hah!) they’d have been better off navigating the rapids without the boat. Here we are…jump in and float downstream.
The biggest surprise to me was that the ending was not like Night of the Living Dead.
I had almost that exact thought, but then decided that since mom was undecided and probably a nicer person than any of those princesses anyway, that naming her after her mom was a good thing.
On another front, I couldn’t decide why most people were killing themselves - some here have mentioned “horror”, but the ones we saw killing themselves were pretty calm about the whole thing. It probably wasn’t a telepathic command, because then I wouldn’t expect any acolytes.
And the acolytes didn’t seem particularly deranged (for folks whose mission would cause 90+% of the folks they interacted with to die) - they weren’t looking to hurt non-viewers - they seemed to want to share something awesome (so, sort Jehovah’s Witnesses).
Theseus was busy dealing with the Minotaur (and stuff), and probably didn’t care that looking at one of the gorgons would turn you to stone. Which was common knowledge, because that was specifically the curse that Athena put upon Medusa (and her sisters) for getting raped by Poseidon. It was such common knowledge that the guy who wanted to bang Danae sent her son Perseus off after Medusa because he’d die looking at her to cut off her head, and with Perseus out of the way the motherbanging could commence.
Didn’t see it, but laughed at the description by Roy Wood Jr on TDS: This is a movie about a white woman cussing at her kids in a boat. 
Was he accurate?
Theseus, Perseus, Whatever. 
So the ancient Greeks solved the problem the same way: “common knowledge”.
Did we ever see the birds actually function as an early warning system? I don’t recall a scene like that – given the TITLE OF THE MOVIE you’d think they’d play a bigger role.
About the ending:
[spoiler]Didn’t Malorie and the kids just move from a small house/small group to a larger house/large group? Uh…yay?
It’s as if War of the Worlds ended with the Martians in control, except for a building surrounded by a cloud of bacteria.[/spoiler]
I thought it was a perfectly fine movie. It wasn’t “The Godfather,” but nor was it “Ecks vs. Sever.” It had a coherent story, relatable characters, and a sympathetic protagonist who went through an arc. I’m not sure why it’s getting such a polarized reaction.
Yes, they distinctly showed the birds freaking out when the monsters were close at least once, maybe a couple of times. And when that one dude was in the house, he purposefully put the birds in that cabinet/fridge thing before he started tearing down the window covers and trying to expose everyone, so he knew that the birds might warn the people. And in the blind school at the end, the guy Sandy is talking to mentions that the birds in their garden/aviary work as a warning system.
She first noticed it in the market when the guy was let out of the freezer. That’s why she grabbed them in the first place.
The short answer is, for all intents and purposes, “magic”. Basically different flavors of the same tech Amy Adams experienced in Arrival and Natalie Portman experienced in Annihilation. At least The Happening had some sort of chemical basis to it.
The closest real world parallel I can think of would be a strobe light triggering an epileptic seizure. Except in this case, everyone is susceptible and either becomes suicidal or insane.
A valid question as to how they figured out the rule though. Everyone who looked at that thing I didn’t see killed themselves!
They showed some of the people saying “Look at it, it’s beautiful” or some such before killing themselves. It wasn’t too hard to figure out. I think we as viewers could figure it out before we were explicitly told so I don’t see why there’s a question about how the characters figured it out.
Not wishing to continue beating this horse…but I will anyway. IIRC, the first loony to say “look at it, it’s beautiful” was Gary, the guy they let into the house. This was after the blindfolded grocery run.
(Earlier in the film we saw the guy in the river say the same thing while attacking Malorie and the kids. But this was 5 years later.)
I also thought this movie was at least OK. There’s a lower bar if you can just watch it new on Netflix v going to a theater though.
-
The explanation I’ve seen that’s most plausible is that what you ‘see’ looking at the ‘beings’ is some kind of projection from space, so you can only see it in a place with a line of sight to space. Something like a hologram though not exactly because it also disturbs the air, but a commenter elsewhere said it rustled the trees at the top as well as leaves on the ground (I didn’t notice) so supporting the idea it’s coming from above. But then there’s also the fact that if it could come inside it would be a short movie…
-
The movie could have dwelt more on the people who insanely want others to see it rather that becoming suicidal. But the introduction of those people didn’t break my concentration on the movie, seemed plausible enough as presented (in part based on other contagion type movies).
-
Yeah, that one also runs across almost all post apocalypse movies and TV shows with a timeline of years. I gave on The Walking Dead as hopelessly repetitive after a few seasons, I saw clips in later seasons where they ride horses, but I wonder if there weren’t still cases of ‘finding’ working cars after years.
-
I also thought that, that if the birds were an effective detector they’d allow you to peak briefly at least when the creatures/images weren’t around. If not, just a curiosity.
-
I though right at the beginning ‘blind people!’ so the ending was no surprise in that respect.
-
Yeah
-
Also seemed to me that in a hardnosed modern movie (not a classic movie) one or both the kids would die if the adult refused to choose which one to risk. So it wasn’t a hardnosed movie.