The Happening

I like Shayamalan movies, they may never capture the magic of The Sixth Sense but he can’t make the same movie over and over again. I do have to say that Unbreakable was terrible, however I watch it every time it’s on, and Lady in the Water was just as forgettable. But for The Happening, I had high hopes. I adore the thought of an atmospheric disturbance causing people to spontaneously commit suicide. You can’t fuck it up right? Wrong. You can fuck it up if you hire actors who could have easily been substituted by cardboard cutouts and voiced by computer programmers with box goatees. But the premise behind the story was awesome.

The movie introduces us to the air born madness in Central Park, where all insanity begins. Two girls are on a bench talking, when one stabs herself in the neck. AWESOME! The other girl looks around to see everyone around her going all hara-kiri on their asses.

Anyway, as this suicidal trend is spreading through my stomping grounds, we meet Elliot and the Funky Bunch, a sappy sweet and poorly acted teacher in sunny Philadelphia. Upon hearing about the epidemic, he grabs his equally poorly acted fellow employee, a math teacherand his daughter and his own wife, Alma (as an aside, I lived next door to the Dechanel’s in London and was good friends with Emily. We were however all convinced that Zooey was… “special”, and if this movie is any indication, I think she very well may be) and they make haste to leave the city. When the math teacher looses contact with his wife, he panics and decides to find her but only ends up killing himself instead.

Forming survivalist groups, they begin to travel to the areas not affected. They run across some botanists, which I have never done myself, and compare theories. Al Gore was right, and the planet hates us and we are systematically being ethnically cleansed. Again totally awesome, would have been better with zombies, but I digress. The groups of survivors become smaller and smaller.

Apparently, the movie was supposed to be a nod to the B movies of the 50’s. Well, it succeeded in becoming a B movie of the 21st Century. I enjoyed it, even though it was torture watching Wahlberg, Deschanel and Leguizamo which made me bleed from the eyes and ears, I just can’t shake how frightening it would be to have the earth kill us off.