The Happening

[Kenshin1387]

Who voted The Happening as their favorite!? SHOW YOURSELF!! xd  

[candy flavored zombie]

Kenshin1387

I am excited about The Happening coming out tomorrow and will be going to see it. I am a fan of M. Night's movies and am excited for this R rating so the younger kids won't be in there screaming/talking whille others are trying to watch the film in peace. (No offense to you younger people that know how to conduct yourself in a theater!!)

Anyone else looking forward to this film?

I agree with everything you said. And I love M. Night's film so I will definitely be there.  

[McflyingRubberDucky]

So...people are saying the movie wasn't good.... But I'm still going to watch it since it has Mark Wahlberg in it! xd  

[Mister Shimo]

Heres the official review for the film by www.movietickets.com

Although it has some effective moments and a clever premise, M. Night Shyamalan's latest thriller is short on thrills. Not a whole lot HAPPENS in The Happening.

Story
Improving on his last two duds, The Village and the dreadful aquatic nymph tale Lady In The Water, writer/producer/director M. Night Shyamalan gets back to the kind of eerie, paranoid thriller he so successfully mined in early efforts like The Sixth Sense and Signs. The results this time are mixed in this story of a mysterious environmental "happening" on the East Coast that is causing large groups of people to commit suicide. As he does in his most effective films, Shyamalan focuses on a core group of people who must find a way to survive these strange events. Elliot (Mark Wahlberg) is a Philadelphia science teacher already dealing with marital problems with his attractive but rather unstable wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), now thrust into full crisis mode as he, his wife, a fellow math teacher, Julian (John Leguizamo) and Julian's daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) hit the road by train, then car to escape the unusual plague, first thought to be a terrorist attack. The group soon realizes it is more than that, perhaps a forceful message from Mother Nature cued by the growing winds and rustling of tree leaves. Joined eventually by two older boys, Jared (Robert Bailey Jr.) and Josh (Spencer Breslin), Elliot tries to be the voice of reason as each person begins to meet their own fates on a journey into a heartland of unexplainable terror.

Acting
Unlike most contemporary horror films in which actors must battle butt-ugly creatures, most of the genuine frights in this flick are left to our imagination. Here Shyamalan wants us to experience what the characters are going through the abject fear on their faces. Wahlberg is particularly good at expressing a growing feeling that events are slipping out of his control. He's amusing in a direct encounter with a house plant he fears may now have the upper hand and in the film's best sequence where he must convince a batty, paranoid old woman (an intense Betty Buckley) to let the group stay in her remote farmhouse. Forced to utter lines like "just when you thought there couldn't be any more evil invented," the quirky Deschanel has her work cut out for her but is likeable enough in the end. As a math teacher Leguizamo spends much of his screen time calculating everyone's odds for survival until his own becomes questionable. As his daughter, Sanchez is appealing and handles herself well.

Direction
Shyamalan is the heir apparent to Alfred Hitchcock--in his own mind at least. Hitch's The Birds seems to be the template, but that 1963 classic is light years ahead in every way. Unfortunately, Shyamalan is becoming something of a one-trick pony as The Happening is basically a retread of things we've seen him do before. There is no question he has superior skills. He clearly gets the horror genre; he just doesn't seem to know how to make it fresh anymore and the answer isn't by ratcheting up the body count. Reportedly, 20th Century Fox asked him deliberately to make an R rated film (his first) and its those gore-filled elements which seem superfluous here. Do we really need to see a guy commit suicide by willingly letting some zoo lions rip off his arms? It's glaring and out of place with the subtler aspects of the director's style. Plus, the use of overbearing and obvious music cues (score is by James Newton Howard) shamelessly telegraphs whatever scares the movie and only serves to emphasize the shortcomings of M. Night's sketchy screenplay. Still, as a summertime time-waster, The Happening fills the bill, but as an eco-thriller with dire warnings for humankind, it drowns in its own promising potential.  

[sankapoo]

McflyingRubberDucky

So...people are saying the movie wasn't good.... But I'm still going to watch it since it has Mark Wahlberg in it! xd

Ahh Wait for it to come out on dvd!  

[JareBearr]

i heared it was bad so i dont realy wanna see it  

[Niran_Betta_Fish]

To start with, the film's time posted on the internet was fifteen minutes earlier than at the theater. I timed my arrival hoping to have missed the annoying pre-trailer commercials. Instead I got fifteen minutes of commercials for things I don't want followed by 25 minutes of some of the most boring trailers ever. There was not a movie in there that I plan to see and having to sit through nearly half an hour of them really put me in the wrong mood for a movie I was already worrying would be as bad as The Village. I figgited, I did physio, I ate the free popcorn. I wished I'd stopped for a frappacino or something. I think this is an insanely bad marketing decision, weighing down a movie like this with that huge weight of bad trailers that were clearly not targeted to the film's audience. I don't expect to like all the trailers before a movie, but I feel like there should be some genre connection between trailers and film. Why make horror/suspense viewers sit through smarmy romance chick flick trailers? can there really only be one upcoming film in the entire suspense genre and one in the horror genre so that they had to pad out the rest with couples holding hands on beaches?

It wasn't as bad as The Village, which was a relief, but it wasn't great. It was patchy. There were some decent scenes, but mostly the pacing was as my grandfather would have said, "Slower than cat s**t in January." Oh man, so slow. There wasn't much suspense either, as it was fairly clear in any given scene who would die and who would survive. Add to this some extremely annoying main characters, I quickly found myself wishing everyone in the film would die horribly. Add to this typically wooden acting from both Zooey Daschel and Mark Wahlberg and cheesey bad violence special effects and the thing was... Signs without Joaquin Phoenix and the mass market appeal.

This wasn't Lost in Space, I'll never get that time back bad, and I would have been wondering what it was like if I hadn't seen it, worried I'd missed something, but this was pretty meh. Vaguely nonsensical meh that didn't quite jell.  

[the_forgotten_thought]

i didn't like the movie. i mean, it didn't have any suspense. it was just kinda scifi. not what i was expecting i guess.
my tip is to wait for your friend to rent/buy it and watch it free.  

[Countess Erzebeth Bathory]

I loved Lady in the Water and I liked The Village.
Everyone I know says The Village sucked, but I beg to differ.
I got angry when one friend actually generalized him as a mediocre director when he's had really good movies like Signs, The Sixth Sense...

I didn't like The Happening at all, but I found that the concept was great.