"The Happening", which M. Night Shyamalan has openly said is intended to be an entertaining "B Movie" as in check yer brain at the door popcorn thrill ride... might even be a failure on that simple level...
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Shyamalan's story -- about a married couple and a small child being driven farther and farther from civilization by a fatal airborne threat -- covers territory already over-tilled by countless disaster epics and zombie movies, offering little in the way of suspense, visceral kicks or narrative vitality to warrant the retread. The helmer's gift has always been for conjuring suspense from silences, shadows and enclosed spaces, a talent that gets little workout here."
I won't include links to the reviews quoted above and below, because far too many of them give away key plot elements... but the above certainly surprises me -- that Night even fails in his trademark silence-shadows-overbearingscore ways. O_O
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The movie seems more like a '50s science fiction film of extreme paranoia or an episode of 'The Twilight Zone' that even at a swiftly paced 90 minutes feels padded.
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M. Night Shyamalan has finally gone over to the "dark side." After being strictly a PG-13 director of thrillers such as "The Sixth Sense," for which he received an Oscar nomination for best director, "Unbreakable" and "The Village," Shyamalan has ventured into the R-rated waters with his latest chiller, "The Happening," which opens Friday. Don't expect nudity or tons of naughty words; "The Happening" is receiving its rating due to violence and bloodletting.
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"M Night Shyamalan's latest movie, The Happening, is not merely bad," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr. "It is an astonishment, so idiotic in conception and inept in execution that, after seeing it, one almost wonders whether it was real or imagined.... So rather than write a conventional review explaining why you should or shouldn't see The Happening (trust me, you shouldn't), I'm offering an alternative: A dozen and a half of the most mind-bendingly ridiculous elements of the film, which will enable you to marvel at its anti-genius without sacrificing (and I don't use that term lightly) 90 minutes of your life. As this is intended to be an alternative to seeing the actual film it is, of course, overflowing with spoilers."
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For the New York Times' Manohla Dargis, The Happening "turns out to be a divertingly goofy thriller with an animistic bent, moments of shivery and twitchy suspense and a solid lead performance from Mark Wahlberg. Much like Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix in Signs, which this film resembles in mood, effectiveness and flaws, Mr Wahlberg fits into the Shyamalan universe comfortably. He rides the spooky stuff with as much ease as he does the jokes, the manufactured sincerity and cornball messages."
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"There's even a whole lot in common with the infinitely more awesome Shaun of the Dead, from the way that an apocalypse can bring an estranged couple together to the channel-surfing explanatory postscript. Because this is Shyamalan, however, there is one final compulsory gotcha. I spoil nothing that isn't already quite spoiled when I reveal that even then, the director just reuses a familiar idea."
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"What is most bizarre are Shyamalan's touches of comedy - bizarre because they appear to indicate that he realises how ridiculous everything is, but they do nothing to mitigate the film's absurdity and implausibility," observes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "His movie lands, decisively, the wrong side of the laugh-with/laugh-at divide."
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"Mr Shyamalan has said that he writes B movies with A-list talent, camerawork, and style, but no amount of beautiful faces and quality cinematography can save The Happening from self-destruction," writes Meghan Keane.
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"It's an entertaining movie, which is half the game, but it's not scary, which it should be," writes Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle.
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There is really no way of understating how much of a failure M Night Shyamalan's The Happening is.
It is the first film of his real career that feels incompetent and utterly gratuitous at times.
It is the first time he has used his good taste in actors and then hang them out to dry, getting perhaps the worst (adult) career performances out of Wahlberg, Deschanel, and Leguizamo... and then kicking Broadway stars Betty Buckley and Victoria Clarke in the teeth to boot.
It is the first time that I, as a viewer, felt that Night lost the courage of his twist-victions mid-twist.
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I don't want to say "The Happening" is a bad movie. Well, yes I do; in fact, consider it said. But it's bad in more than just an everyday, sure-does-suck kind of way. Director M. Night Shyamalan's last picture, "Lady in the Water," based on a bedtime story that put everybody to sleep, was a bad movie plain and simple. "The Happening," on the other hand -- with its what-the-hell plot, lobotomized dialogue and consequent B-movie performances -- is worse, in a way, because littered among its many baffling passages are brief, vivid demonstrations of what a skillful filmmaker Shyamalan can be. And has been. I'd say "will be again," too, but that no longer seems such a sure thing.
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Damn. I really wanted to hear the movie delivered the suspense-thriller punch that this skilled but formulaic artist is known for... Perhaps in this cynical Interweb Age complete with pre-release spoilers on web encyclopedias, there's no hope for a sentimental folksy storyteller anymore?
One day about two years ago, while Shyamalan was talking to the media in Spain, a journalist asked the writer/director of "The Sixth Sense" (1999), "Unbreakable" (2000), "Signs" (2002), "The Village" (2004) and "Lady in the Water" (2006) what he planned to do next.
Without even thinking, he replied, "a 90-minute paranoia movie."
And thus was born "The Happening."
"I'd had this idea," Shyamalan says, "and it stuck with me, the tone of it, in my head. It was this feeling of something happening and you don't understand what's going on, and you're feeling more and more trapped in the situation. You're unable to get out and your nagging belief of what's happening is so irrational and so bizarre that it can't be true.
"All that paranoia was in my head."
"What we consciously did was say, 'We're going to make a very disturbing, scary movie. That's what it is.' And it is. It's a paranoid, very scary movie, and shocking, and we wanted to cast it with the most likable people we could possibly cast it with.
"At the center we wanted people you'd be charmed by, who make you smile when you see them, who are just buoyant and light," he says. "Mark, Zooey and John just are so easy to watch, and then they also come across such interesting characters along the way.
"We didn't want tortured souls," Shyamalan concludes, "but beautiful, fun actors whose characters then have to go through this paranoid, scary experience."
"I wanted it to be a fantastic, fun B-movie," Shyamalan told Reuters in a recent interview about the eighth film he has written and directed. "The No. 1 thing is I want people to say: 'That was a really fun B-movie.'":sigh:
Nuts... :(