The Happening

I watched The Happening* this weekend. Yes, yes, I know – it got slated. But I am a sucker for apocalyptic fiction, and I hoped it might confound the reviews. Sadly, it didn’t.

Imagine you’d let Al Gore write a sci-fi chiller. What would he write it about? Why, the environment, of course. And what would the crushingly dull moral be of the that chiller? That we should respect the environment more. Because it could turn against us. Oooo, scary.

Except it isn’t scary. Trees don’t actually kill people by releasing chemicals that make them want to kill themselves. And this film doesn’t make me want to save the trees for fear that they will unleash a terrible revenge on us all. In fact, if I did believe that, then I’d buy a frigging chainsaw and cut a few of them down. Just to be on the safe side.

And few films have made the threat of mass suicide seem so boring. Basically, if the trees get you, they’ll make you stop, take a few steps back, and kill yourself. And not just kill yourself, but kill yourself in ludicrous ways. So you have the man who, rather than hanging himself with his shoelaces or a belt, decides on death by combine harvester. Or the old woman who decides head butting a window until there is like glass in her face and everything is the best way to shuffle off this mortal coil. And in the background you have a chinless wonder of teacher (who teaches the most placid pupils ever) running around with this girl and his extremely dull wife in ever-decreasing circles until the whole horror just… stops.

The whole experience compares unfavourably to another apocalyptic film released last year; The Mist. In that film, the menace is tangible and real. The whole picture is claustrophobic and terrifying. There is no attempt to make a social point with the threat; it is horrific monsters causing the calamity. As opposed to The Happening, which is basically about people running through the countryside in the summer to escape the wind.

Somewhere within The Happening, there is a great story. And if the script had been rewritten, then we could have had a classic film on our hands. If I was to change anything, it would be to change the pace of the film. By showing the menace from the outset, the director is forced into more and more outrageous death scenes to try to ramp up the tension, and also has to pad out the film with a lot of running around. As a result, we end up with unintentional hilarity. Instead, the events in New York should have been told rather than shown, to a group of people who don’t really care about what is happening in the Big Apple. Then the menace should get closer and closer to them, provoking more and more fear from the members of the remote community. Then, when the calamity hits the town (say, at the 45 minute mark in the film), we’d know (and hopefully care) about the characters, and the mass suicides would be all the more devastating as they would be jarring and the result of the director creating dread in the first half of the film. There is a reason why the first half of The Birds has little to do with the mayhem of the second half of the film – it makes the second half far more effective.

M. Night Shyamalan can write decent films. Where he struggles is bringing his films to the big screen. Even his best films – like The Sixth Sense and Signs seem flatly directed, with occasional flashes of brilliance. But watching The Happening made me feel that he lost his way by being unable to write a decent story and put that story on the big screen. If I was him, I’d be more inclined to focus on writing great scripts and letting someone else direct them. That way, we may get another classic film form Shyamalan. As it stands, I think his films will end up being living proof of the law of diminishing returns.

*Terrible, terrible title by the way. Makes it sound like a 1960’s style party, or something. “Yo, dude, you heading to the happening, man? Be there or, y’know, like, be square.”