Paranoia and disaster (for the audience)

Rating: 1/10 (30 June 2008)

'The Happening' was promising and will always be promising. But just the idea and not what it panned out into. I wish good things for Shyamalan. He made the most memorable horror movie I have seen (which seems to have become a baggage for him). But he has slipped right into the bottom. He just takes the germ of an idea which he keeps on blowing and when the end credit roll in, he is still seems to be blowing it! Someone should have told him to stop because he never finishes the film. In the end, we become a joke and in turn everyone will make sure he becomes a joke.
This was his worst attempt to make a thriller, worst than 'Lady in the Water' whose core idea was flawed, 'the happening' actually had something interesting and the audience were holding on for something to answer the occurrences of self annihilation among humans. They do not happen to get anything out of this mushy-romantic creep fest (the first of such a genre!), while Shyamalan even after he ends the episode of nature-revenge without any meaning to it in north-east America; he starts another one in Paris which makes the audiences smack there head time and again. With no core theory involved to tell the story, the movie should definitely counted worst than some of the eighties slasher movie, such was the sorry state of the film. The director does show glimpses of his talent, mainly when the main protagonists along with few survivors enter a model house of an upcoming real estate property full of plastic trees and wax food and all, where his characters show great paranoia with a good hint of humor placed around the situation they are in and the place where they are present at that moment. Such sequences of paranoia are sprinkled across the movie, but nothing to explain such behavioral pattern, the audience are the one who left paranoid. And finally the most paranoid of all 'the actors', Zooey Deschanel has to be the worst actress for this year, who acted so paranoid even before anything had happened from her first scene where she gets a call which she does not intend to take! She was worse but was not alone, surprisingly Mark Wahlberg was also below or the guy just needs to stick with straight face roles.
In the end, with its front leads coming up with below par scores along with a director whose career is in a free fall, the movie with its subtle messages for the citizens of the planet earth already blurred out, reaches its final conclusion, disaster and paranoia for the audience.