Chalupa’s Movies

From my perspective, no other current Hollywood persona is as intriguing as M. Night Shyamalan. Did he really just get that lucky with The Sixth Sense? I believe it is that amazing breakthrough film from this writer/director with a knack for suspense and surprise endings that has kept audiences coming back time and time again. Despite some decent follow-ups, never has he repeated the excellence of his first film, and many would agree that his films have been getting progressively worse.

And so, we complain and complain about his movies, but still somehow get excited about showing up for opening night every two years for his latest offering, perhaps hoping that maybe this will be the one to capture the same feeling as The Sixth Sense. This is enough to say that Shyamalan is doing something right. Despite the things he’s doing wrong–and lately, there’s quite a bit–he still keeps us coming back for more. Few people have given up on him yet.

That brings us to The Happening, a film proudly advertised as “apocalyptic” and Shyamalan’s first rated-R feature, featuring some bizarre epidemic–supposedly caused by plants attacking large populations of humans–that forces people to kill themselves in increasingly creative ways. Mark Wahlberg, seemingly advertised as some sort of hero, is rather just one of many ordinary people trying to avoid the attack.

(Here’s one more thing often complained about–What’s with the deceiving advertising with this guy’s films? Everybody was stunned to find out what The Village really was about. And The Happening had nothing to do with the rapture like I was told.)

The bad news first. Simply put, the movie indeed causes you to constantly ask, “What’s happening?” But not in a whodunit sort of way, and not in an edge-of-your-seat-what’s-going-to-happen-next sort of way. No, instead you find yourself asking, “Is this serious? Did that really just happen? Did he really just say that? Did she really just deliver her line in that way? Is it possible to make a movie this preposterous?” My wife and I spent the entire movie hoping–for Shyamalan’s sake and for the sake of our $18 admission–that the surprise ending would reveal that the whole movie was a joke, a sort of film inside of a film, a spoof of sorts. We weren’t that lucky, and neither was Shyamalan. It was just that bad.

The dialog is absolutely terrible. The acting is pathetic. The cinematography is cliche. The gore is tactless and hokey. The entire film comes off as incredibly cheesy schlock. By the end of it I was hoping this was Shyamalan’s tribute to the campy B-side horror genre. I still think that’s the strongest explanation, although I’ve found nothing on the web to back that up, and even so, I’ve never quite been sure how we could make a “legitimate” art form by making something that is simply and intentionally bad.

It takes some serious misguidance to turn an Oscar-winning actor into the character we see in The Happening. Literally every line causes the viewer to wince with discomfort. Is it Wahlberg? Or is it just that there was literally no good way to deliver the lines that had been written for him? When Be Kind Rewind came out earlier this year, I heard many people suggest that Michel Gondry get some help writing his scripts. I’ll agree that they need help, but I also think Gondry has different intentions with his films than creating a stellar, flawless screenplay. We need to get Shyamalan some help with script writing much sooner than Gondry.

I ended up giggling through most of the movie, and not because it was supposed to be funny. Again, if it was Shyamalan’s intent to create a campy B-side flick, then so be it, he succeeded. But regardless of his intent, it was bad. Really bad.

There’s a bit of good news, though. Shyamalan is a master of suspense, and there’s no doubt about that. I jumped out of my seat more than once, and when I arrived home to my dark apartment, a shiver went down my spine and I rushed to turn on the lights. If you’re looking for a good scare, this is a decent place to turn.

And I have to say I enjoyed myself. Between giggling at the bad parts and jumping at the scary parts, it was a good bit of summer Blockbuster fun.

But most importantly, I admire that Shyamalan consistently tries to say something with his movies, another facet making him one of the more intriguing filmmakers today. While most critics are looking at the environmental themes of The Happening–save the honeybees and the trees before it’s too late–I think Shyamalan has some much deeper statements to make. Love conquering evil is an obvious theme, but perhaps too obvious. The most poignant statement is his dark caricature of Christians. The last woman left to help Wahlberg and his friends is a woman living in isolation who recites the twenty-third Psalm, has all sorts of religious paraphernalia on her walls, and wears a cross necklace. When she claims that “the world doesn’t care about her, so she doesn’t care about it,” it forces the Christian viewer to think long and hard. How much of this caricature is Shyamalan’s bitter misperception and how much of it is deservedly true?

So in short, it was a terrible movie. But if a director can cause people to think and talk this much time and time again, and keep us repeatedly coming back for more, maybe he is doing something right.

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