The Happening

I ended up watching M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening lately. The trailers had intrigued me, and for the most part I like his movies. The Happening starts off with an unexplained "gas" attack that breaks out in New York City's Central Park. The unexplained result is that people become disoriented and start committing suicide. News of this spreads and people quickly try to escape the city. Unfortunately the "attacks" spread to the rest of the US Northeast.

Wahlberg and Leguizamo play school teachers that try and get their families out of the area by train. The cast was convincingly quirky and kept my interest. Some have said that the inclusion of kids in the traumatic scenes were a bit disturbing. But, if this were a real incident, the kids would realistically be caught up in the mess. Adds to the drama.

I do have to say most of the shock scenes were adequate, but could have been done better. One scene in particular was poorly done and laughable. It was a scene in where people were viewing an iPhone video of someone being mauled by bears. It looked like a Saturday Night Live sketch filmed on a blue screen, completely fake looking. At times in the movie I felt I wasn't actually scared but startled by the loud music that punctuated every shock scene. I did like the situations that transpired though, as it seems to be similar in theme but the total opposite of a zombie horror flick.

In the end though, I left unsatisfied by the movie. The events that occur are poorly explained and purposely vague. I really wanted to see more of what was "Happening." I wanted to see more of what was going on in the major population centers, but was forced to follow the characters into the countryside. Then just as quickly as the "Happening" started, it just ends with the cop out explanation that things can happen in nature that we will never fully understand. This kind of ending works great on a TV show like The Twilight Zone or The X-Files, but for a feature film is hardly acceptable. M. Night Shyamalan's trademark twist ending fails this time around.