An underwhelming "disaster" movie

Rating: 5/10 (13 June 2008)

Humanity faces many dangers to its existence. War, plague, nuclear weapons, global warming, and a host of other problems haunt the minds of millions around the world. While the list is extensive as it now stands, M. Night Shyamalan believes he has found something else to add to our collective unease....
And, in doing so, he and The Happening fall flat.
Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) is a dedicated biology teacher in Philadelphia high-school. His life revolves around his students and his neurotic wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) which both provide for a stable, if perhaps rather uninteresting, urban life. With his close friend and fellow teacher Julian (John Leguizamo), Elliot has a comfortable life that is stable as it is predictable. Even rumors that Alama is unhappy with the marriage, rumors of course that Julian is more than ready to encourage to "help" his friend Elliot, isn't enough to shake Elliot out of his self imposed scientific mindset which of course all high-school biology teachers rely upon.
That is until something unexplained happens in New York City. Without warning, or explanation, dozens of people suddenly become disoriented as listless. Even more terrifying is that those affected begin committing suicide on a massive scale. Self inflicted gun shot wounds, impalement's, and throwing themselves off high rise buildings are but a few of the way that dozens, soon to be hundreds and then thousands, end their own lives. What's worse is that whatever it is that is occurring seems to be quickly spreading out from New York and affecting the entire Northeast of the United States.
While no one has a reason or explanation as to why this is happening, Elliot, Alma, Julian and his daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) escape the city along with anyone else who can get out. However, they soon discover that there is no escaping from "the happening" that is destroying the populations of some of the largest urban areas in the country. Abandoned in a small rural town outside the city, the four and the rest of the train's passengers discover that they are on their own and expected to find their own way through whatever it is that is forcing thousands to destroy themselves.
The plot above sounds like an exciting thriller that would push the audience to be engaged with the plot and the characters who we would of course care about. However, unfortunately that does not happen (no pun intended). Instead of an intelligent plot and deep characters, The Happening is instead full of poor attempts at humor, bad dialog and unintentional laughs. It is explained that the plant kingdom has somehow decided to declare war on man and that by releasing a toxin in the air it has unleashed a weapon of mass destruction where there is no defense against. There is no nothing more dangerous sounding than the evolution of plants, right?
The Happening centers mainly around Elliot, Alma, and Jess running from one field to the next while Elliot tries to find a scientific reasoning in order to keep them all alive. What this amounts to is running from the wind (how is that possible?) and staying in small groups because the plants "know" where the larger groups are. As with all disaster movies there are encounters with those who don't want to help and desperate situations where the characters resort to things they otherwise would never have done. The problem is that once we know what is causing the happening to occur it all seems so futile and even amusing. The wind blowing in the trees? Well, that means your days are numbered.
The Happening is a good idea that unfortunately had little to offer in substance and whether or not there was an intentional environmental message behind it is irrelevant. There are many things we need to worry about but thankfully plants trying to kill us with toxins isn't one of them.
5/10