Shyamalan's The Happening Review if have to be summarized in a single statement :
The Happening was Not Happening for Shyamalan.
M. Night Shyamalan's most critically tampered movie would be The Happening. As per Shyamalan, The Happening basically evolved on a thin line idea when he drove across and looking at the greenish and garden state New Jersey. Here is the flash. What if plants kill humans. In hollywood, a simple thought or an idea can be made into a movie with a hulky grandeur. But unfortunately not all movies do well in the box office.
Shyamalan has said that The Happening is really about religious faith, and explained that he chose Mark Wahlberg to play science teacher Elliot Moore because of the actor's intense and strong belief in God Jesus. But there is no clue of why he chose Zooey Deschanel to play Mark Wahlberg's wife as Alma in it.
Elliot teaches his science students about evolution. He explains to them that honeybees are disappearing all over the country, and asks what some possible explanations and reasonings might be. Students say things like "climatics changes" and "evolution", which are dismissed as being "partially right." But then when a generally quiet student finally says, "It's an act of nature that we can't understand," Elliot lights up and says that's the best answer. That phrase "act of nature," which sounds suspiciously like "act of God," crops up in the movie again and again to explain why plants have suddenly decided to kill humans.
Once people in New York City start killing themselves in random and horrific ways, Elliot flees with his wife Alma and his friendly math teacher pal Julian, as well as Julian's daughter Jess. The people gathering throughout the movie was all happening while the plant killing humans were happening. Shyamalan has given a strong signal that he is capable of a full length comedy movie by showing some elaborate comedy sequences in the movie. But that somehow twisted the plot to more of a comedy thrller than a authentic thriller. A little slippery script here i would say.
As a gang of characters flee into the Pennsylvania countryside, they gradually begin to realize that the frequent suicides might be caused by plants. News on the TV's suggest how the "attacks" probably aren't coming from terrorists. Elliot uses the "scientific method" to deduce that plants can "spontaneously evolve" in response to a threat. Kind of weird but thats what the movie is about.
Elliot suggest that plants think humans are threats, and "spontaneously evolve" in an "act of nature" to produce a toxin that switches off humans' real instincts?
Elliot also discovers that plants are causing the suicides, and he explains that plants only attack humans in groups. So he and Alma head off into the deepest, unpopulated countryside with three kids from a group of refugees (Julian has gone with another group to Princeton to find his wife, leaving daughter Jess with Elliot).
Despite all this absurdity, you've got to admire Shyamalan's amazing ability to carve out a perfectly-constructed horror/scifi plot without actually ever having any kind of monster or makeup threats. We all know Shyamalan is highly capable in doing this from what was presented in village and signs. We get all the classic "scary monster" moments in this movie — people staring at stuff with horrified looks on their faces, distant screams, long tension-mounting shots in creepy houses — and yet at the moment when we expect to look into the face of The Big Bad there's literally nothing. No Cloverfield with its throbbing, toothy face, no disfigured bad guy with a bag of poison. Just beautiful fields of trees and grasses moving gently in the breeze.
There's a kind of true brilliance to The Happening at these moments. It's as if Shyamalan, a smart guy if nothing else, is trying to show us that at the heart of every monster movie there really lurks nothing at all. Just an empty field that you can fill with whatever terrifies you most. And yet a meditation on cinematic form and the construction of horror movies isn't exactly what The Happening wants to leave us with. Instead, we are forced to watch in where's-our-twist-ending boredom as the "happening" ends abruptly — at the exact moment when Alma realizes she really does want to be a proper wife to Elliot, and to be a mother to the now-orphaned Jess. As some TV talking heads explain later, "events like this can just end suddenly." And we're left with an image of Elliot, Alma and Jess embracing in a de-monstered field of plants, in the middle of an Eastern seaboard which has almost completely suicided itself. All these little incidents of start and end of the happening is shown on the screen with digital timing.
Three months later, Jess is happily skipping off to school. Private schools in NYC are easy to get into at last, since all the kids are dead. Luckily, however, Alma is ready to help repopulate: She dances out the door to meet Elliot coming home from work, bubbling over with the good news that she's pregnant. Praise Jesus! At last, Alma is doing what "nature" and "evolution" want her to do. Finally as shyamalan is always with a twist, brings back The happening.
Overall, a brilliant effort from Shyamalan to carry this plot and make it a movie that can fit into a horror/thriller genre with non-horrifying characters. Simply a watch it once movie and nothing special about it.
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