This weekend, I caught the newest M. Night Shyamalan film, The Happening. For background here, if you didn't know, you should probably be aware that I'm a big fan of his movies. The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs are all on my top 100 list. I wasn't crazy about The Village the first time around, but upon a subsequent viewing (with, I think, my expectations better set for the type of movie it was), I found a lot to enjoy in it. And I think I'm one of about 100 people on the face of the planet that liked The Lady in the Water. A lot.So with that background, you can understand that when I tell you I was pretty disappointed in this movie, it may well mean that you'll absolutely frakking hate it.
Obviously, there have been elements of the supernatural at work in all Shyamalan's films. Moveover, the stories have often dealt with issues of faith. This movie does so as well, but this time places as the central character a science teacher. And rather than play around with the fertile narrative ground where science clashes with faith (as, say, most any random episode of Lost tends to do ably), this movie just makes the guy a really lame science teacher, completely bowled over by the elements of faith the writer/director is interested in portraying.
A recurring theme of the film is the notion of the "will of nature," and every time it comes up, it is promptly dismissed as something unknowable, uncomprehendable, and beyond examination. And hey, if you're a writer with a McGuffin in your story you don't want to explain, that's ordinarily your business -- it's the very nature of a McGuffin to drive the story without ever being explained logically. But to have this science teacher, and another science expert on a television interview in the film, just shrug shoulders and go, "yup, force of nature, can't be explained, and that's just fine with me?" Ridiculous, in my view.
I mean, if you had had a science teacher in high school who tasked you with offering an explanation of some mysterious natural event, and in lieu of any theory at all (no matter how weak) you just came back with, "well, it's nature; you can't really understand it," you'd expect an F for the class, wouldn't you? Not this walking voicebox for the writer.
And really, the entire script is a transparent mouthpiece for the writer. I've got no problem with a work of fiction that wants to be didactic, but I expect a certain level of subtlety around the message. This is a methodical hammer blow on the anvil for 90 minutes.
But did I hate the movie? No, because so many of the dramatic skills Shyamalan showed in his earlier films remained in play here. At times, this movie was truly unsettling and creepy. It delivered scares. It delivered real horror -- moments where you cringe and recoil at what is unfolding. It displayed a very knowledgeable hand in manipulating the audience, composing memorable images on the screen, creating vivid minor characters to populate the tale. All great stuff.
Yet each of these great moments was like a piece of candy. You eat it up in the moment, and it's wonderful and enjoyable, and you're ready for another one, and then it's great too, and so on. And then, at the end of the box of candy, you're still hungry because you haven't had anything like a true meal.
This is really a "message movie," which is in a way as new a tale for M. Night Shymalan as "love story" was for The Village, or "fairy tale" was for The Lady in the Water. But it's a very ham-fisted and oftentimes awkward message movie. Allowing for the very effective moments of suspense and horror within it, I rate it a C+, but for an M. Night fan like me, that's basically a pan.
5 comments:
I should really catch up on my Shyamalan. I only saw part of The Village and none of Lady in the Water. My interest in The Happening is just above tepid, though I already know the "twist" in the story.
My problem with Shyamalan is that he continues to direct his own writing. I would love to have seen a different writer punch up Unbreakable and a different director handle Signs -- though I consider both to be great films as they are. Perhaps he should take some pages from Alfred Hitchcock's book and try to collaborate with a good writer on his next project. Less George Lucas and more Hitchcock is a much better approach.
I swear that Al Gore's name is in the credits somewhere...
Having known the gimmick for a few weeks, I was laughing at the previews and tv ads for some time now. Having seen the flick this weekend, it didn't do anything to really change my opinion of it being dummer than a bag of hammers. I think the real mystery here is how so much talent got involved in a script that was not even close to being anything but a (poor) SciFi tv movie.
Man against nature films have been done before - ad nauseum. But damn, I never thought one would make "The Day After Tomorrow" look like a well written scientifically based flick! "The Happening" either needed some explaining done a la "The Day After Tomorrow" to make nature really threatening - OR...it just needed to go all out campy in the vein of 50's nature gone wrong flicks like "Earth Vs. the Spider."
They had the simplest of explanations - DDT made the spiders resistent and grow to spectacular size and OH MY GOD IT'S GONNA KILL US! And that's all they needed to make a campy and enjoyable flick. By the acting, I'd guess that is what the CAST was going for.
As the local radio reviewer Reggie McDaniel said..."Even the acting was a dog. I take that back. The people jumping off the building did a great job - and I felt their pain." And lord, for Reggie to hate a movie...I haven't known him to hate a movie in YEARS now.
"The Happening" doesn't join the bad movie stack with Uwe Boll movies. It does however join the "so bad it's ridiculously funny" stack along with "Battlefield Earth". It's competely MST3K worthy material in its entirety.
Or, you could join the group of teenagers at my screening who were going to come back and turn it into a drinking game. "Drink every time someone says the work "HAPPENING"." Drink every time Marky Mark speaks an overly written and insanely precise sentence that sounds retarded."
Ok, the second one was mine- but the first criteria was theirs.
Had this been a "Twilight Zone" episode at 30 minutes, it would have been great. Even an hour long "X-Files" episode might have been good. But as it stands, it's an overwritten story containing a cocktail napkin worth of plot, acted out by a cast with all of the heartfelt effort of a potted fern.
/end rant (snarl)
Richard Roeper and Michael Phillips got into it over this movie this weekend. Roeper's defense was that so many critics have carved a hate stick for Night. Phillips's biggest critique was that Night payed a lot of attention to mood and no attention to plot.
Again, I will catch this in the aftermarket, where I might not have felt suckered into dropping more than $10 for a viewing. I realize I should see these things for myself, but I often trust the words of many of my friends, who have cautioned me to stay away from Spider-Man 3 and many other recent flicks. I never feel like I'm missing much if so many who have similar tastes and analytic approaches don't like something.
I think Roeper and Phillips are BOTH right, by what you've said. Yes, Shyamalan's good stuff in this movie was all atmosphere and mood; the plot was lacking. And yes, critics have been viciously hating on Shyamalan for two or three movies now. (I think it was deserved here, but I LOVED Lady in the Water, and I think critics hated it because the movie critic character in the story is a stuck up jerk that gets mauled by an animal.)
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