The Happening (SPOILERS!)

Cafe Society
1

My wife and I went to see The Happening tonight, and I thought that I would report back with some initial impressions while it is still fresh in my mind…

Just so you know exactly how I feel about this movie right at the start, allow me to say this: Take the $20 that you would spend on a couple of tickets to this movie and buy a cheap bottle of booze instead. Drink the entire bottle and spend the rest of the night staring at the wall. You’ll have a better time with the wall than you will with the movie, trust me.

First, I have an opinion about Mark Wahlberg’s role. Mark Wahlberg plays a science teacher in this movie. This means that not only is he supposed to be someone who understands science, but he is supposed to be able to teach science to others. This has got to be one of the most miscast roles that I have seen in a film in a long time. At no point in the movie do you believe for even a moment that Mark Wahlberg’s character has ever even seen a science textbook, much less the inside of a science classroom.

and now for the spoilers…

[spoiler]So people start to kill themselves in Central Park, and then in the rest of NYC, and then all over the Northeast. The people become disoriented, and then they find the quickest way to kill themselves.

Chaos ensues.

Everyone flees the big cities, thinking that terrorists are attacking. Mark Wahlberg reads a map and tries to direct people to small towns…

BLAH BLAH BLAH

I can’t even bring myself to type out the rest of the plot because IT SUCKS.

You want to know what happens? You want to know what makes people kill themselves? Really? Ok, it is the plants. The plants are PISSED that humans have been polluting the earth. You see, it seems that plants are able to communicate among themselves to coordinate this attack. They are also able to rapidly evolve to attack imminent threats. So naturally when humans pollute too much the plants evolve a toxin that turns of the self preservation mechanism in the human brain…you see where I’m going with this, right? The plants attack the largest concentrations of humans first, NYC. Then the attacks spread to Jersey, Philly, etc…

Part of the plot was devoted to Marky Mark and his struggling relationship with his wife, but you don’t need to hear about that because it is completely boring and unbelievable at the same time. Eventually everything gets back to normal, and the movie fast forwards three months into the future showing Mark Wahlberg and his wife living back in their own home.

Oh, and the twist? You know there has to be a twist because this is an M. Night Shyamalan movie! At the end, when everything seems to be fine three months later, the movie cuts to a park in Paris, France. It looks strangely like the first scene of the movie that took place in Central Park. OH NO!!! The Happening is happening again in France![/spoiler]

You may recall that many of the ads for this movie are making a big deal that this is Shyamalan’s first R rated movie. In my opinion the only reason for this is because the movie is so bad, they had to throw in some shocking scenes of people killing themselves to try to scare the audience.

There were several times during the movie that I thought that this movie must be joke. Surely this can’t be a serious movie, can it?

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I have heard this is bad… like, bad on a biblical level. Incomprehensibly bad.
Having said that, me and a friend are THERE. We like Shyamalan… but we have observed his downward trajectory over the past few movies. We hated The Village, and we ROARED laughing during Lady in the Water.

We’re gonna MST3K the hell outa this one.

3

Wow, that plot secret sounds really half-baked. Just OTTOMH, [SPOILER]you’d think that any overpopulation-triggered apocalypse would happen in a place like Tokyo, Mexico City, or Calcutta. NYC is practically pastoral compared to certain other world’s biggest metropolises.

Also: plants? I could see a sci-fi scenario in which all of nature’s fauna band together to wipe us out, but the flora seem rather inadequate to the task of rewiring higher primate brain circuitry, through a hormonal mechanism or any other means.

And lastly, this plot pisses me off because it veers perilously close to ripping off Raccoona Sheldon’s/James Tiptree Jr.'s classic sci-fi short story “The Screwfly Solution,” which hasn’t been made into a feature film yet (I’m not counting TV or cable adaptations). And, thanks to the critical failure of this film, “Screwfly” is probably even less likely to be developed now than before. Thanks, Shyamalan![/SPOILER]

4

You should have checked the reviews before spending your $20. They are overwhelmingly bad.

5

Thanks for this. I was strangely curious about the movie and I’m now satisfied. Uwe Boll and M. Night should have a fight to the death.

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We did check the reviews. We knew it was going to be pretty bad. We hoped it would at least be a little entertaining. We were sorely disappointed.

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If you checked the reviews and knew it was gonna’ be a bad movie, how could you be disappointed? Unless you were disappointed that it wasn’t as bad as the reviews said it was.

My thinking on this is; if I want to see a movie, I’ll pick one that has positive reviews and/or good word-of-mouth. The chances of me being disappointed are greatly diminished using this strategy.

I would never pick a movie just because it was heavily advertised on television the week prior to its release and because “everybody” was going to see it that weekend, especially if it was getting panned by the critics. And I would certainly be wary of any movie that used the fact that it was R-rated as one of its major selling points.

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SWMBO and I saw it last night. Shamalamadingdong seems to have lost his touch lately, but it’s still a reasonably entertaining movie. Be prepared for some very gory scenes, though.

My objection to last night was, and will probably continue to be, the jerks with their cell phones putting on their own light show during the movie. One of them was so bad that the third time I yelled at him, I had to add “Yeah, asshole - that means you!”. I got a round of applause for that, but I would rather watch the movie uninterrupted.

The theaters need to change their PSA from “please silence your cell phones” to “TURN THE GODDAM THINGS OFF!”.

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The idea was interesting, but he didn’t pull it off. I’ve come to believe that “M.” stands for meh, mess of a movie.

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I’m still planning on seeing it tomorrow.

I’m one of about five people who actually liked Lady in the Water, so I can’t really trust the reviews.

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What I want to know is what the hell was with Deschanel’s pupils. She had pinpoint pupils for over half the film, when no one else around her had that level of pupil contraction. I couldn’t figure out if it was drugs, if they’d put some drops in her eyes to try to make her look convincingly sad (weepy, bloodshot eyes), or what. (Nice move on making her character emotionally repressed to work around that ‘sucks at emoting’ problem.) I spent most of the film trying to compare her eyes to everyone else’s, because it was a hell of a lot more interesting than this clunker of a film.

By the ending -

I was wishing for an “omg what a twist” switcheroo. No such luck.

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There’s a difference between entertainingly bad (Plan 9 From Outer Space) and just dull, dragging, end-it-now bad (Ishtar, maybe? Never seen it).

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Nope, Ishtar is, disappointingly, not that bad.

It’s actually kind of entertaining, on purpose even, if you watch it in the right mood.

-FrL-

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Ishtar was pretty bad, but I’ve seen worse. It’s become fashionable now to defend Ishtar and say it was a good movie that was killed by the media; don’t you believe it. It was legitimately bad, and it looks dated as hell now.

But it’s not REALLY bad. “Highlander II” was really bad, and not in a fun way. The last “Les Miserables” movie, the one with Liam Neeson, was really bad. “Ishtar” was just conventionally bad.

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FTR I arrived at the “Ishtar’s not that bad” conclusion all by myself in the privacy of my own living room, sans communication with anyone else about the film. :slight_smile:

You’re right that it’s dated, though.

(And the Liam Nieson Les Miserables is “really bad,” like Highlander II bad? :dubious: How plausible is it that a movie with a 77% rating at rotten tomatoes is Highlander II bad?)

-FrL-

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I agree. I assume the original poster would put “The Happening” in the latter category. Maybe some people, who know it’s going to be bad, go see it hoping that it will be “Plan 9”-bad. Personally, unless Mike/Joel and the Bots are there, I’m not going to waste a minute of my life watching a known bad movie when there are so many known good movies I haven’t seen (and won’t have time to get around to seeing in my life-time).

Also, why encourage Hollywood to continue making tripe with your hard-earned dollars by patronizing these things? In this information-rich day and age, there is no excuse for someone walking unknowingly into a theater showing this week’s latest crap-fest. Yet, there IS a market for bad movies. Without that market, some people (I’m looking at you Adam Sandler and Pauly Shore) wouldn’t have careers.

I’m not saying I’ve got better taste than the masses…

Wait.

Yes I am.

17

That pisses me right off. I love post-apocalyptic fiction, and I keep having high hopes for movies like this, and they keep not being any damned good. Dammit. Do you hear me, movie makers? I want some good p-a movies!

18

I saw it tonight. I agree; save your money.

But then, Shyamalan’s stuff has never worked for me. My date chose it and the lady is always right. She apologized. “No, no…” I replied.

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A few thoughts:

Now, I find the bare premise an interesting one- plants evolving a chemical defense measure against people. Didn’t realize the film was going to turn into global warming propaganda, but okay.

But, taking everything at face value, I was confused as to why some people went to such ridiculous lengths to kill themselves and some just went at it with whatever was around. The guy who started up the lawn mower and then lay in front of it? The whole theatre cracked up at that one. And the guys who hung themselves from trees? Why didn’t they just throw themselves off of the trees? And the old woman bashing her head through the window at the end? A large part of the movie just seemed to be an exercise in inventing interesting ways for people to off themselves.

And so many movie cliches! The couple having marriage trouble. Them having to take care of a kid. The ending: as soon as the movie began, my friend leaned over and whispered, “betcha the girl is pregnant”. And the pregnancy COULD have been a nice, subtle way to end the film- like, despite what tragedies happen in the world due to overpopulation or pollution, people will keep having more babies, and these issues will continue to arise. But then that crappy thing in Paris? What the hell? Just the tired monster movie ending that shows the monster’s supposed corpse trembling with life. So much for subtlety.

Also, was I the only one thinking, “they’re trying to OUTRUN the WIND???”

I also kept expecting people to hold their clothes up to their mouths and breathe through them, but no one did. That’s what I would have done, anyway.

Zooey Deschanel is like a poor man’s Shelley Duvall. I kept thinking, the wife in the shining had that exact look, the goggle with the eyes.

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I made the mistake of seeing it yesterday and, I agree, it was awful. Easily Shyamalan’s worst – I actually liked Lady in the Water, for the most part and, while I didn’t like The Village, it had a little bit of entertainment value. This just had absolutely nothing go for it from start to finish.

One thing that took me out of it right away and repeated itself at the end:

In each of the initial “attacks” there seems to be one person completely immune to the effects. The girl at the beginning just watches her friend stick a hairpin in her neck, but the girl herself isn’t zombified like everyone else. Same thing with the guy at the end – everyone else in the park is frozen, but he seems to still be of sound mind. It just didn’t make sense to me