poor, misunderstood The Happening

Rating: 7/10 (20 August 2013)

I went into this movie knowing all the negative reviews it had received, but I watched it anyway because I find general reactions to Shyamalan's films don't always coincide with mine. I liked the Lady in the Water a good deal, and while I thought Unbreakable was overrated, the only one of his film's I would have been better off not watching was The Village.
While it's certainly not his best movie (which is, and probably always will be, The Sixth Sense), I liked this from the freaky beginning scenes in which people inexplicably begin killing themselves. There's something wonderfully low key about it all, as though people are too confused to even freak out.
That's one of the things some of the other people here have criticized - people not freaking out - and I think that's because people have come to believe movies are reality and if people don't act like people do in other movies then they're acting unrealistically. I wouldn't presume to predict how a situation like this would play out.
Another thing that I like is the lack of certainty about what's going on. Many of the reviews here ignore that, just describing this as a man versus plant movie, but that's just one of the suggestions made during the film, and while the movie clearly has an environmental point (and regretfully sheds some ambiguity at the very end), it is not as simple- minded and clear cut as critics suggest. It would be more accurate to call this a man against wind movie, since it is something unknown in the air that is causing this, and I like the fact that the threat is unseen and unknown.
The approach is clearly lifted from Hitchcock's The Birds, and it's interesting how everyone was willing to accept the vagaries and poor science of that movie yet lambastes this one.
As with Lady in the Water, there is something notably non-Hollywood about the way people react in this film. No one knows what to do, no one knows what's going on, people constantly make bad decisions and there is a distinct lack of heroism. And I like that. In a way, I feel Shyamalan is an indie filmmaker who engenders Hollywood expectations. I feel that many of the film's critics want both this film and Lady in the Water to feature Tom Cruise jumping off of buildings and blowing stuff up.
I also quite like the odd minor characters. It's interesting that the most helpful people in the movie are kind of disturbing. I've seen movies where the hero was helped by someone great, or helped by someone who turned out to be dangerous, but I've never the hero helped by people who were just the sort of peculiar people you would inch away from if you didn't need their help.
While I don't understand the hatred of the script, I can see some point in complaints about the acting. Zooey is like someone with a piece missing, almost sleepwalking through the film, and the movie either needs her more engaged or needs to make us understand what's behind that. And while Mark seems fine in the lead role, I will admit that I was not strongly invested in the characters. But then, that was also true in The Birds.
I think what keeps getting Shyamalan in trouble is people don't understand what movie he's making. Both this movie and Lady in the Water were accused of not being scary enough, and if Shyamalan was trying to make them really scary, he failed. But I don't think he was doing that. I think he is more interested in Hitchcockian suspense than in pure horror, and I think the Sixth Sense is, in a way, his curse, because everyone says, "do that again," and that's clearly not his goal.
This is not to say the film had no flaws. There were definitely moments that were unrealistic. The suicides were sometimes too imaginative to be likely, and at times behavior seemed designed specifically to get the characters to a particular point rather than because it made sense (i.e. the train drivers' actions).
In spite of some issues though, I found this movie very entertaining, and enjoyed it seemingly for many of the aspects that others found so unlikable.
My takeaway is this: I can never listen to anyone else when it comes to Shyamalan. Now that I realize that, I guess I should even go ahead and watch The Last Airbender.
(FYI, Were I to order the Shyamalan movies from best to worse, I would say The Sixth Sense, The Visit, Signs, Lady in the Water, The Happening, Unbreakable, The Last Airbender, The Village.)