The Happening
Dir: M.Night Shyamalan
Stars Marky Mark minus the Funky Bunch and Zooey Deschanel (Trillian from H2G2)
There's no boring pre-amble here, the film starts off with people in Central Park NY, stopping in their tracks and then killing themselves en masse. Emergency Services arrive on the scene and the 'event' begins to spread, first to a local building site then all throughout the city.
Elliot (Wahlberg) is a high school science teacher and after being pulled from his class and told the city is being evacuated due to a terrorist attack, grabs his wife from home and meets up with his colleague from the school with kid in tow. They get on a train and are out of there.
From here on in, it's very reminiscent of 28 Weeks Later or War of the Worlds. Good guy on the run from some unstoppable force, trying to save his family. First with a large group, which is gradually trimmed down to the key plot characters by everyone else dying.
Some frankly hideous exposition goes on, too much of the plot is advanced by 'TV News Channels' and one crazy old geezer with a crackpot theory, who inevitably turns out to be right; and dead.
A lot of you might know what the 'Happening' is but I'm not going to reveal why these people are all dying. You might enjoy it if you don't know what's coming. But they really lay it on so early, that all but an imbecile will see the 'message' coming.
Yup, it's a sanctimonious critique of modern culture, an attempt at a Romero style satire, not on consumer culture as such, but on how we pollute the environment too much.
We already know this... it doesn't hold the film together properly, and there is 1 particular logical problem which ruined it for me. The wind seems to blow at peculiar times, as if it is somehow being controlled. That part is never explained or even addressed. It also fails to explain why the 'event' would have boundaries so similar to American State borders. Even if you buy into the whole 'Happening', you could never explain that.
So, formulaic plotting, lacking in logic, mediocre acting, no sense of urgency, and ultimately... boring. Also the ending was so ripped from 28 Weeks Later it's not even funny.
But you might like it, I just felt I had seen it all before, too often recently.
Similar: I am Legend, 28 Weeks Later, Dawn of the Dead, War of the Worlds
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