"Awful" doesn't cover it.

Rating: 1/10 (14 June 2008)

I haven't seen an M. Night Shyamalan movie since "Signs", although I've heard each was worse than the previous ones. Strangely, this gave me hope that "The Happening" would be a turning point for the director that had won so much acclaim with "Sixth Sense".
Sadly, this isn't the case. "The Happening" is easily the worst movie I have ever seen in a theater, and is a strong contender for the worst I've seen altogether. I've never even written an IMDb review before, but felt compelled to write one for this movie.
1) The acting is horrible. Sometimes you go to a movie and the cast has one lousy actor in it. This was the opposite. The entire cast is uniformly bad, with the possible exception of a construction worker in the beginning watching his buddies plummet to their deaths. These performances are a hallmark of poor direction. I know that Wahlberg, Deschanel, and Leguizamo can actually turn in good work under the right director.
2) Almost no one seems to react to what's going on around them in a realistic way. Only one person (practically an extra) ever really freaks out. Everyone else just kind of bumbles along until the wind catches up to them.
3) The premise is ridiculous. Supposedly, the plants are tired of us polluting the environment and mowing the grass, so they decide to start releasing toxins that cause humans to go insane and kill themselves. There are a few massive problems with this.
First, the movie presents evolution as something that occurs within the lifetimes of organisms, when it actually takes many thousands of generations. Trees haven't had any time at all to evolve that kind of defense mechanism, and grass isn't particularly concerned about being mowed. Otherwise, it would have evolved a toxin to kill off grazing animals thousands of years ago.
Second, the movie makes it seem as if the plants can somehow consciously communicate with each other. Although plants do indeed send out chemical signals, these signals are not under any kind of conscious control.
Third, the movie mixes up plant defenses with ecological phenomena such as algae blooms. Algae blooms occur when a variety of factors all converge to provide an ideal environment for overgrowth of algae. The algae population cannot sustain such large levels and eventually the excess dies off. Plant chemical defenses are not remotely similar. If a species of plants evolves a defense mechanism, all future descendants will have it, and it will continue working indefinitely. If such a mechanism appeared in grass, it would eventually make its way across the country. The effect wouldn't magically stop working just in time to save the protagonists of the story.
Finally, it doesn't make much sense for a "toxin" to cause suicides. That kind of behavioral alteration is usually seen in the reproductive cycles of parasites that infect their hosts' nervous systems. Plant defenses are either poisons (such as nicotine) or chemical signals that attract predators to hunt the plant's attackers.
4) By the way, the "antagonists" are plants. Although this could have been made to work somewhat like "Andromeda Strain", Shyamalan decided to add a bunch of foreboding shots of plant-life. It isn't easy to make trees and grass look evil, so wind kicked up each time people are about to die. The toxin would accumulate more in still air, so you'd be better off waiting for the wind to blow past you. Leave it to a science teacher to miss this point and make sure everyone "stays ahead of the wind".
5) The score is ham-fisted and overbearing.
6) So is the dialog.
7) There is no "twist". A random character we never care about reveals the cause of the mass suicides sometime in the middle of the movie, and he's exactly right. I was hoping the real cause would be the creepy lady at the end who hates the outside world, but alas no; she becomes a victim just like everyone else.
8) In a couple of scenes (at the very beginning and very end), we see one person who is not apparently affected by the "toxin". We never find out what happens to them, nor why they aren't affected. In reality, there would certainly be more people not affected, and the people who were would likely be affected in different ways. Psychoactive substances never affect everyone the same way.
9) Just before the final scene, we see Wahlberg, et al. back home three months after the attack. No one appears to have suffered any kind of psychological trauma. The little girl, whose parents are both dead, is going off to school, and somehow the Northeast is repopulated. I'd be very curious to know what they did with all those dead bodies. More likely, massive numbers of people who were not directly affected by the plants would have committed suicide due to depression. No one in their right minds would move back to the region, so the only living people in that part of the country would be clean up crews wearing Hazmat suits.
10) In the very beginning scene, the one person not affected by the toxin begins describing what she sees, but the camera never shows us. "Are those people clawing at themselves?" Where?! Sorry, you'll never see it. It's like watching a Bob Newhart phone conversation. In spite of the character's comment, you never see any of the victims clawing at themselves. Everyone who falls prey to the plant toxin freezes, then quietly (and expediently) commits suicide. It's a continuity error that occurs two minutes into the movie.
There are so many more things wrong with this film I don't think it's possible to list them all. The shortest list of the movie's flaws is, sadly, the movie itself. Hopefully this review will prevent you from seeing it, or at least prepare you for the inevitable disappointment.