“If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.”
— Albert Einstein seen on a chalkboard in The Happening-according to Roger Ebert, Einstein never said this-but the quote gets 88,000 hits on Google saying he did.
I know what your thinking-M. Night Shyamalan should find a nice rocking chair next the Wachowski Brothers and Chris Carter in the Home For Has Been Film Makers. Certainly the last couple of M. Night Shyamalan movies were not much to write home about. I liked M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense and I sort of like his Unbreakable-but not as much as all the other nerds and geeks who could relate to Mr Glass’s opinion that comic art is Real Art. But I think we need to give M. Night Shyamalan a little more time, after all Alfred Hitchcock didn’t make Psycho right out of the chute.
And speaking of good old Alfred Hitchcock, if you’ve seen The Birds, then you are familiar with the plot of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening. In The Birds, birds start attacking people for no reason-though I always got the feeling that our dimwitted blond heroine was somehow to blame. The Happening takes the attack straight to plant life-though it seems to be localized around the Northeastern USA for some unknown reason.
The Happening is thought to be a Terrorist Attack, but then the attacks keep striking smaller and smaller groups. People take a deep breath and decide to kill themselves. The gore level is not as bad as I thought it would, what with people running over themselves with lawn mowers, jumping off of rooftops, and hanging themselves from the tallest trees. As with all End of The World movies, we start off with a fairly large group-people on a train, and whittle our way down to the two or three people we actually care about.
The ending of The Birds was pretty much left up in the air-our heroes making a break for it, but we will never know if they escaped. In M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening we are given the standard modern horror movie ending-all is back to normal-or is it?
I didn’t see M. Night Shyamalan make his usual cameo in The Happening, though it seems he was the mysterious Joey who had dessert with the bug eyed Zooey Deschanel who plays Mark Wahlberg’s wife. There was a shot of her phone near the beginning of the film and we hear Joey’s voice once.
The Happening is a slow paced film with a lot of funny/sad moments. There is something about everyone on earth dying that most film makers, and science fiction writers, find irresistible. It is also fun to imagine that your the last man, or woman, on earth-no more jerks on the drive to work-no more work, you always get the good parking space and can follow Bart Simpson’s example and fill your room with priceless artifacts stolen from museums. Oh wait, he did that when he stopped time, not when he was the last man alive. Well, same thing really.
So it was good, if not great, and these days that makes for a good movie in my books.
