Ska, who are you trying to drop knowledge on?
I get
The Happening plain and simple. But movies aren't books. Your ideas can only go so far in making up for the technical, theatrical, acting and directing letdowns your film can have. If you can't connect. If you can't execute your ideas in a meaningful way, then why didn't you just write a book? You don't need $100M to express your ideas. You don't need all the fuss and the hype and the marketing and the big production. But if you
are gonna get all of that. If you
are gonna make the claim, that what you can bring the to screen with those ideas can meet some kinda populist, critical or artistic standard, then go ahead. If someone's willing to front you, let it out.
That wasn't this.
The Happening is a terrible film regardless of its ideas. It's bad on a minute by minute, cut by cut, scene by scene level. It's a parody of itself. You would swear that M. Night forced every actor to act with an affect on purpose. To what ends? God knows. But it makes it a grating, cringeworthy, disappointment to film. And THEN...in the middle of it all, we get hit with an anticlimacic literary, matter of fact twist, that practically spits in the face of anyone stupid enough to buy the marketing and a ticket and that M. Night finally got back on track.
It makes sense on a literary level. So make it literature. There are plenty of books like this. But if you can't execute it in film, that's on you.
The Birdsis 50 years old and they were able to film a big literary idea like this and make it work. M. Night? It's a film where we follow a high school science teacher. So of course they casted Mark Wahlberg, known thinker. And I'm guessing, to soften the blow of the twist, M. Night decides, let's let it out early. Known thinker, just looks at the grass blowing and realizes...omg...it must be nature.
And why not? How big of a leap is it to suspect mother nature? And that's the end of discussion And all of that without any discussion. Oh...sure that makes sense, I think you got it.
No other reasoning. No validation. Nothing for
us, as a more intelligent audience than say...20 or 30 years ago to take in...to see any logic in this being the only solution. No counter, that it's
pretty stupid if that's the only way nature figures to attack us. Science is real. It actually exists. This wasn't science. That's like taking a math professor, giving him a calculator and 5 minutes later he tells you what the winning lotto numbers for tonight are gonna be. And worse, that was the end of the narrative. Where are the stakes, when it's nature? What's the point, when it's the wind blowing. How is this something that ever needed to be filmed? And how are we supposed to feel about these flat characters all accepting the state of things?Suddenly we're just running from the wind and hoping nature spares us. And it does. And that's it.
Remember people, be better to nature or...wait...nope lost my train of thought.
There was an X-Files episode I saw when I was like 9 only the one time. And it stayed with me so vividly, because it felt profound. It touched on similar ideas as The Happening. Scully and Mulder get thrown into the sticks hunting down this Big Foot Fish. And they're fish out of water, and away from the paved roads and electricity, stuck in the leftover world all our modern success left behind. And they play the whole skeptic/believer thing. They wade through the waters, and people get got. Nature is trying to kill them. And at the end of it, Scully says this one quote that stuck with me: 'Have respect for nature, because it has none for you.'
That's it. That's all M. Night is trying to get across, and look at all of the fundamental film things he cannot do right for his life in this. You wanna call it a noble POS, fine. Ignore the film, follow the message? By all means. It can have you imagining the better thing it maybe could've been, but don't call it a good film, because of that.
