Life's a boring movie and then you die and there ain't anything you can do about it.

Rating: 5/10 (14 June 2008)

That's pretty much the clearly unintentional plot line of The Happening.
Boy! I wanted to like this movie, but I had too many mixed feelings about it. The premise is sheer genius, but becomes buried, obscured and confusing within the thin disaster film type drama and shock value of the character's reactions and interactions of what is happening to them.
It's like the movie Village of the Damned. So what if kids are taking over the minds of the adult community and making them do their bidding. That gets old after a while. We want to know WHY, HOW and WHERE it could lead. That's why I never thought that movie was that scary. If you're going to mess with the psychology of the human mind, you'ld better direct the mind accordingly. The Happening suppresses this.
I would've opened the movie straight off before the credits with the Einstein quote about the disappearing bees that is briefly and obscurely shown on the teacher's blackboard a little ways into the movie.
I completely missed this due in part to the second rate soft focus print of the movie I viewed at my local theater. This would've immediately set the tone to allow the audience to suspend their disbelief since it's a real quote from a respected scientist and addresses a very real, ominous and mysterious situation we live in today.
But no, I was left with too many contradictions as to what exactly is causing people to commit suicide. Nature taking revenge by producing hormones that secrete psychotropic, suicide inducing chemicals into the wind like a bad cold front to fight its enemy-humans? Genius! I believe it!
But then why are some humans spared and others not? OK, I guess nature is selective? Show us why it's selective. OH! I know! It spared people who were in love! That's it! NO? This is all I thought about through the entire movie. And then it ends so cheesy and anti-climatic with no explanation. So I guess life's a boring movie and then you die and there's nothing you can do about it.
Note to Mr. Shyamalan, could you remake this movie, please. There's a masterpiece in there somewhere.