When M. Night Shyamalan blew the world away with The Sixth Sense, I became an instant fan, so much so that I gave all his movies a shot, even after the “flop” that was Lady in the Water. So far, the rest of his movies haven’t lived up to The Sixth Sense standards, but it’s not really his fault. That film did so well that, unfortunately for Shyamalan, every time he has a new film out, viewers automatically start guessing what the twist is. As far as twists go, though, how easily can you outdo the kind that made The Sixth Sense an unforgettable, billion-dollar hit?
Seeing the trailers of The Happening, I was actually thrilled Shyamalan had returned to the scary movie mold. You’ve got to give it to him for being original, even if you don’t always get what you expect. I’ve seen enough zombie films to imitate how they walk, but Shyamalan actually had his, er, zombie-like characters—ordinary humans going about their ordinary day who suddenly lose their trains of thought—walking backwards and finding some way to kill themselves.
In a scene that had me cowering behind the shawl I usually take with me to the movies, a traffic cop suddenly shoots himself in the head. The cab driver he’d been talking to calmly walks out of the cab, picks up the gun, makes a couple of steps forward, and then shoots himself, also in the head. A woman in the sidewalk then picks up the gun, makes a couple of steps forward… At this point, we’re only seeing legs and feet and hearing footsteps or the tight clicking of heels—and then dead bodies. People would remember The Happening, if only for that.
The movie opens in Central Park, New York. It’s a normal, if not extraordinarily, beautiful day. Suddenly, people just start killing themselves, with another chilling scene being one worker after another falling to their deaths from a construction site three blocks away. The phenomenon then occurs in Philadelphia, where Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) is a science teacher. It’s blamed on a terrorist attack (they’re Americans; can’t blame ‘em), and people start an eerily silent exodus to wherever. Elliot; his wife Alma Moore (Zooey Deschanel); his best friend, math teacher Julian (John Leguizamo); and Julian’s daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) decide to evacuate the city by train.
I’d have to point out that even at this point Shyamalan is original—the evacuation is devoid of the hysteria that characterizes apocalyptic films. Humans don’t regress to their “basic survival nature” here. They’re subdued, scared—which is more probable, I believe, when you suddenly hear news about people calmly and calculatedly committing suicide en masse.
Elliot and company’s train stops in a small town, mid-route. The engineers say that they’ve lost contact, and people are left to fend for themselves in the middle of nowhere. What happens to them is the meat of this eerie story.
So, what’s happening? It would be telling if you knew from the start that the working titles of this film were Green Planet and The Green Effect. Apparently, the planet has reverted to survival mode and is getting rid of identifiable threats through neurotoxins released by plants. It doesn’t seem so eerie when you read about it, but if you manage to get past the disconcertingly subdued dialogue and toned down acting and actually get into Shyamalan’s world (few critics have; thus the numerous bad reviews), you’d feel the chill too.
And if you’re anything like me, who tries to get any value out of anything, even a self-admitted B-movie, you wouldn’t look at plants in the same way again.
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