Movie 18: The Happening

In Central Park people start acting strangely, erratic speech followed by standing completely still. They then start killing themselves by any means necessary. A short while later, men start jumping off a building at a building site. A terrorist chemical attack is suspected but people start evacuating major cities. Then it’s happens in Philly. What’s causing people to kill themselves and how do you stop it?

And who cares? Jesus this is a bad movie. But it is the guys first film, a student film at that so I should cut him some sla….wait, what? This is his 8th? Oh hell…

Now a lot of people have commented on this film as M Night Shamalamadingdong falling from the previous glory of The Sixth Sense. I didn’t see that film until last year for some reason, not sure why to be honest. So I was aware of the “amazing twist” at the end. The most amazing thing about that twist is it has apparently blinded everyone to how bad The Sixth Sense is. If you watch it knowing what’s going on the relationship between Bruce Willis and his wife is just WEIRD. In my opinion, of the movies I’ve seen, M Night has made 1.95 good movies. Unbreakable and most of Signs. The rest suck to one degree or another. Okay, Sixth isn’t too bad and I haven’t seen Lady in the Water but he’s FAR from the next Hitchcock.

And what we have hear is the first draft of a Uwe Boll movie. Apparently the way to communicate that something strange and scary is going on is to have your characters say “this is weird” “I’m scared” “what’s happening?” over and over again. And while I haven’t seen a making off I can tell you that every shot was called with the following commands:

“Roll camera’s”

“Camera’s to speed”

“Actors all furrow your brows”

“Action!”

Every damned scene everyone has a “what the fuck?!” look on their face. And no one acts or talks realistically. Don’t even get me started on the science as even if it is semi-real it couldn’t sound more fake. To me, the movie was written based on a premise that was developed from half remember Discovery Channel programming that Shyamalan watched while drunk and half asleep at 3 in the morning.

Oh and he apparently thought that the South Park spoof on global warming where people run from NOTHING was incredibly scary, as there’s a lot of that here.

I guess what I’m trying to say is…I didn’t really like this.

Next up: Blade Runner: The Final Cut. The first of this years “You haven’t seen (insert movie title)?!” films.