Those scary trees, that creepy wind.....

Rating: 2/10 (12 June 2008)

No doubt hoping to tap into the enviro-panic that is gripping the world, M. Night Shyamalan has created a still-born, lifeless dud with The Happening, that would have served the environmental debate a whole lot better by not imposing its footprint on the world at all.
The opening scenes - all of which we've seen in the trailer - set up a jarringly compulsive premise that had the heart pounding (it earned the film all three of its stars from me). At some point the distributor Warner Bros should have realised the guy cutting the trailer should have been put in charge of the film - he gets more tension from three minutes than M. gets from 90 mins.
As the character-driven narrative starts to take over, it quickly becomes clear that nobody in this film is in any way relatable - from Mark Wahlberg's gaspy, drippy school teacher to the blank-eyed gaze of Zooey Deschanel to John Leguizamo's know-it-all blatherer, all the way down through the vaguely-comical support players (a loopy, cross-eyed plant merchant; a Gomer-Pyle-esquire army private). M.'s best work - The Sixth Sense, Signs - found the balance between genre suspense and characters that engaged and enthralled. The Happening is guilty of the exact opposite - creating a menace that actually dilutes the tension as more details are revealed, threatening a group of heroes who become increasingly less interesting and believable as the film progresses.
Most disappointing is the apparent dissapation of M.'s skill as a craftsman. Even those who thought his past films underwhelming bits of storytelling would concede that they were good-looking, well-composed examples of a director who knows how to frame the action and find the essence of his scene. Not so here - the colour palette is bland, the staging unimaginative and static, the sense of tension arbitrary and sporadic. It feels like he doesn't want to push himself or perhaps lacks faith in the material. Had it not been the work of a writer-director, I would've blamed the mismatching of filmmaker and material.
Having been a fan, I hope Night hasn't had his day, but The Happening represents something that will trouble his supporters. This is the sort of premise that should be a walk-up start for the director of The Sixth Sense, should provide ample opportunity for thrills and chills for the director of Signs. That it fails so completely begs the question - where to from here...? Oh, and given its enviro-message, its fair to ask - was this film's production fully carbon-neutral? I'm not cynical enough to think M. would latch onto a hot-button issue like global warming just to sell a few tickets, without practicing what he preached...would he...?