Just a few personal thoughts from me for people who have already seen The Happening

Rating: 8/10 (1 July 2008)

I have always found the idea interesting of nature being more interwoven with human beings and their actions than we can scientifically prove at this time in history. After all, human beings don't stand above nature but are a part of it, and maybe you could even say nature created us, making nature a part of us.
So consequently any movie that incorporates and deals with this idea becomes a more valuable movie to me, no matter in what form this idea is part of the story. If it is something like nature protecting its population against an outside threat as in War of the Words, or if it is nature protecting itself against the threat that is the human race, as is the idea of this film. I especially enjoy the concept of human race being like a virus to nature.
In The Happening this is very much the case and nature reacts to the human disease suddenly and mercilessly. It starts in the biggest park in the biggest city of the world. Makes sense...well, movie-sense, to be fair. At the same time it hits some construction workers who are high up on a building three blocks away from Central Park. Makes sense...well...exactly, it makes movie-sense. Next we have another park in an American city that David Lynch loves to hate. Ding dong. Now it's clear what's going on here. Nature VS Humaniy: Round 1
People...Americans...New Yorkers, to be specific, naturally assume it's a terrorist attack. Makes sen...exactly. It's something we had in many disaster movies since 9/11. War of the Worlds, Cloverfield,... That's how it is and I'll just leave it at that. In The Happening it obviously isn't terrorists. Nature turned against humans, in the most original way that I have seen so far in a film.
Back to the plot. Our protagonists, a science teacher, his girlfriend and their friends, another teacher with a daughter, want to leave the affected area (the thirteen colonies of Great Britain, basically) but their train stops in the middle of nowhere in some little town because the train conductors "lost contact". Long story short, turns out that smaller and smaller groups of people are being attacked. If you can say "attacked". Either way, it's a fascinating concept, I think. I asked myself what I would have done in this situation. I thought it probably would be the safest to get away from any other human life form and stay at a place where nobody else is around within a radius of a mile or so.
The audience that I saw it with reacted quite strongly to the film. The biggest reaction came from, what I think was quite a mundane scene. After waking up in the morning Marky Mark searches for the old lady at whose place they stayed the night and enters what supposedly is her bedroom. He slowly approaches the bed. We, the audience, don't see much. We see some legs on the bed as he opens the door. Legs that look like that of a doll, which in the end turns out to be just that. Absurdly, though, Wahlberg, while slowly approaching the bed, says the old lady's name to the thing on the bed. He must have seen that it is a doll, right? I mean, come on. Anyway. So we have tense music playing and all that and then we finally see the doll on the bed. The camera stays grotesquely long on the doll's face and we start to ask ourselves if maybe the old lady turned into the doll. Gladly the film doesn't go that way. We learn that the lady in fact did not turn into a doll when she suddenly screams at our hero and jumps out of a corner. And she jumps and screams at the audience, as the camera is right in front of her. She looked freakier than she did the evening before. And the theater jumped and screamed too. I don't know what was up with that. Had I seen this scene alone at home I would have thought to myself that this is some weak and conventional crap, but since I witnessed what strong reactions the scene got I can't possibly condemn this conventional yet bizarre scene.
Overall the audience was quite jumpy throughout the whole film and especially during the suicide scenes. But it also got quite a few laughs. One such scene I remember because it got the biggest laugh from me was when the science teacher spoke to the plant, saying that he comes in peace. I found it amusing but not ridiculous. While speaking to the plant he notices that it is a plastic plant. "I'm talking to a plastic plant." That was a good joke, I thought. Other than that I remember that the scene with the construction workers apparently falling down the sky evoked some laughter. And I understand why. It was a most grotesque event, in a film that was full of grotesque events. Frighting, but so unusual and out there that you can't help but be amused by it.
One of the main reasons why I watch films is because they can make you believe that something you know won't and can not ever happen does actually happen. You are safe and after two hours it's over, which is why you just role with it. And that's what the audience's job is when there is something outrageously unlikely shown on screen - to role with it. You are not doing yourself a favor if you reject the most outrageous concepts of cinema. The filmmaker's job is it to build a vehicle that you can role with, without the passengers falling out of the vehicle, if you pardon my allegorical speaking. Well, this ride worked for me.