REVIEW OF ‘THE HAPPENING’
(May Contain Traces of Nuts and Spoilers)
You want to know what really happened in The Happening? Well, here’s what happened: M. Night Shyamalan is a deadly bullet through and through. He’s a murderer of his own movies. He’s an auteur who holds on to his idea so tenderly and then he goes either (a) out of control or (b) strolling in the dark without a torchlight (or even a map for that matter).
Mr. Night is way over the top in building up the fear factors, up to a point where ending them in the most vague of ways will not justify anything to anyone. When the plot thickens, it gets corpulent, and when it’s thin, it disappears. He throws us into a curve ball and then brings us back to square one, without a hint of remorse. What remains is a sense of mystery that goes beyond our ability to decipher. He wants us to be a movie detective but we just can't be bothered.
The Happening is a movie I liken to eating a hot cross bun. The top crust is a window-dressing frosted with discomforting scenes. The middle is the fillings of a road-movie that leads to somewhere but not where you want it to be. And the anticlimax culmination is a pause indicator. It’s an interrobang that spells disaster for the man whose career is already at the substratum of doom. The whole meal is stolid. The aftertaste is unpleasant. And I am still flabbergasted by the ending, my breath smells of regret.
When I heard about Mr. Night’s new movie, I was overjoyed, thinking that this would be the comeback everyone’s been waiting for. The premise for his latest flick is promising, but it fails to deliver. What resulted is a half-baked, half-frozen dessert that’s mid-way between The Twilight Zone and The Amazing Stories. At least the predecessors succeeded without much effort.
The Happening is a Hitchcockian eco-thriller. It’s a summer-flick hot enough to burn your brain, as it punctuated itself with logical scientific theories that sounded illogical when used as the framework for a large-scale phenomenon. As we were told in the movie, the plants are turning their back against us, releasing neurotoxins into the air, causing people to hallucinate and commit suicide. This antagonist; an invisible chimera that exists only through the depiction of wind, would be human’s worst enemy whose main reason for attack could be appeasement. When seen through a moviegoers’ viewpoint, this is considered as one of the few original ideas that sit among the lamest, but it could work if Mr. Night had not settled for the easy way out – using plot as a metaphor. And in turn, the metaphor became a question mark and the question mark became the angry faces of viewers. Although it was pretty easy to grasp the hidden message by the time Mr. Night’s name appeared on the end credits, the subtexts that he wanted to highlight could be misunderstood on so many levels. The loopholes are so apparent you deny the fact that you are watching a fiction and just refused to suspend your disbeliefs. You want answers where answers are due.
For the good record, what could be seen as exceptional were the scenes of the suicides. There was the chilling opening set-up where construction workers jumped off a building with their safety-helmets still intact. There’s a policeman who shot himself, whose gun later on became the convenient weapon of choice for the other stock-still victims lining down the streets. Some suspended their necks on the trees. Some rammed their vehicles with ease. Others get creative with whatever that was beyond their reach. And these goriness were done to death (pun very much intended).
Like all his movies before this, Mr. Night never run out of fashion – he is obsessed with getting his characters into a confined space, trying to bring out the sense of impending danger, which you’ll realized by now, has turned hackneyed and predictable.
But what Mr. Night is good at, he presented them with bright, intermittent touches. The use of comic relief interjected betweens scenes of funk and dismay acts as momentary breathing spaces. This has always been his forte – he knows how to balance the opposites and create impact during which you may be caught off guard. Another brilliant touch was the pathos concealed in life’s pathetic dilemma: inducing the central theme of survival at a time of crisis and resolving inner issues within a broader peril. Effectively moving, even if they were detachable.
Apparently, this movie can be classified as being more psychological than physical, and if there is one, I would called it a romantic thriller disguised as a docudrama on topics of catastrophe and nature disharmony.
The setback comes directly from his writing, where words became too tight and too forceful, and we wonder where is the man who once gives soul to the boy who can see dead people. He has forgotten (maybe deliberately forgotten) how to loosen up. This movie pales in comparison to his first four films, though not in the most extreme case. His fifth feature, The Lady In The Water, was an ego trip of sorts written for his kids, so he is forgiven for that. And then comes this – a movie whose narrative superstructure is less disjointed than it was trying. It crashed and burned too fast it makes me furious. Mr. Night’s writing dampens the spirit of a good story that ran a little over 90 minutes and this was clear when some major studios rejected his first draft that was originally titled The Green Effect. But on the brighter note, his scare tactics are still eminent, as he managed to pull his gimmicks and send shivers down my spine, and I personally like that feeling if there’s anything to go by.
All in all, it is still a film worthy of praises even though there are moments limited to be in favour. There are scenes that gripped you in and then plunk you around without warning. There are scenarios where fear could be felt close to heart, but not long before it got stale, with dialogues so contrived, they need a rewrite indefinitely. The actors make up to the failures, with Mark Wahlberg doing a fantastic job securing a heroic figure in one Elliot Moore, whose mode of power was science, which ultimately doesn’t help. Then there’s the pretty Zooey Deschanel as Moore’s two-timing wife, whose life is not without her own set of problems. The rest of the equivocal casts were specifically chosen by Mr. Night himself and I wonder why he wasted his time doing so, because practically, they all have to die anyway.
I believe that Mr. Night has been keeping a stockpile of terrific ideas somewhere in his residency. What he doesn’t have are solid denouements to enrapture the terrified souls of his target audience. Perhaps he should just stick to his twisted ending instead of giving us a work of so much potential but with no credible solution. At least his twist-ending trademark would provide a certain closure. Open-ended movie might be his revised modus operandi, but many are not ready for that, even me, his number one fan. Even the music by James Newton Howard would not cover the flaws, as the bolero turned sour rapidly from the very beginning, banging through the windows of opportunity and then return only to be limping. What left were sounds descending into obscurity. They are somewhat disheartening rather than frightening.
At the very end of the game, it was Tak Fujimoto’s cinematography that stood as the predominant winner in this pandemic tale of terror make-believed only by the talented Mr. Night. It is a challenging movie very different from his other works (his first R-rated no less), but is this enough to redeem himself and to wake up from his previous pratfall? And for the first time, no cameo? Was that among the signs he’s gone to become the sixth sense maniac, trapped in an unbreakable village with the lady in the water?
As much as I wanted to love it, I felt that the end-product didn’t really shine or took my breath away. The lackluster finale was bothering my mind, leaving me little room to be impressed. This is obviously a case of the third-act gone wrong, but in all honesty, the subjectivity of a resolution is by definition 'at variance' - we all have our own ways of concluding things. Perhaps here I am asking too much. And perhaps, to have no answer is probably the best answer afterall, for indeed we are living in a world where facts and fictions collide; where interpretation and imagination filled in the blanks.
I do not demand for the $8.00 I willingly paid to get wasted. I demand that Mr. Night return to top form and gives people the movie they want to see. But I bet another $8.00 that we won’t see it happening anytime soon.
Verdict: ***/*****
