Could be worse. But could be quite a lot better.

Rating: 5/10 (19 June 2008)

I'm an old enough film enthusiast to remember what it was like before the internet - you found about films from the newspaper film critic, maybe a movie magazine programme on TV, maybe a movie magazine from the newsagent. 3 voices, maximum, and easy enough to ignore. These days, the quantity of opinion on the IMDb alone means that, if you're inclined to read about films before you go to see them, it's almost impossible to go in without some preconceptions.
So I took my seat knowing that The Happening had a substantial bad press, and I find myself wondering what I would have thought about it had I not been carrying the opinions of others with me. Because I didn't find it as bad as it was painted.
Don't get me wrong - it is heavily flawed. The worst flaw is the script. There is much "direlogue", character development is somewhat illogical, you leave the movie with thousands of unanswered questions (hundreds of people are dumped off a train in a small town, have a meeting in a diner, and then scream off in a host of cars - er, where did those cars come from? I didn't spot a Hertz next to the diner), there are moments when you really aren't sure what sort of film you're watching, the villains of the piece menacingly wave their branches around (ooh, scary!)... and I think the script and direction are responsible for Zooey Deschanel giving what is likely to be the worst performance of her career. And, given the amount of career she still has left, that's saying something (it gets better towards the end, but in the first half of the film she is astonishingly bad).
So what is there that's good? Well, the idea isn't bad. It would better suit an episode of Twilight Zone, but it's still a reasonable idea for a movie. The film gives a nice sense of a small group of people doing their best to survive as civilisation crumbles around their ears. And there are a number of sequences which successfully deliver quite effective shocks.
Bearing in mind that I'm easily pleased, and that I have a particular soft spot for crumbling civilisation stories, I quite enjoyed The Happening (dreadful title, though).