CS Weekly Archive > Weekend Read > 6/13/08

What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear

By david michael wharton

The Happening

M. Night Shyamalan (also directed)

And so the cautionary tale of M. Night Shyamalan continues. After the diminishing returns of The Village and Lady in the Water, you had to wonder whether Shyamalan could ever recover the magic of The Sixth Sense (and, arguably, Unbreakable). After all, once you've cast yourself as the writer whose work will one day change the world, where else is there to go? Based on The Happening, the answer seems to be "into direct-to-DVD horror films." Mark Wahlberg plays a wide-eyed high school science teacher whose relationship with equally wide-eyed but much cuter Zooey Deschanel is on the rocks. The two are given a second change once an unexplained and deadly event begins happening (do a shot every time someone uses that word in this film and you'll be dead before the second act), sending them fleeing into the countryside. I won't spoil just what's happening in The Happening. Not because I'm wary of spoilers, but because it's so ridiculous that I can't bring myself to type it out. That's the first of many problems resulting in a film that, while not the incoherent ego-stroke of Lady in the Water, still manages to be less effective than any given Saturday Night Sci-Fi Channel original. While Shyamalan succeeds in creating the odd moment of genuine tension, scenes that are intended to be frightening are more often comical, dialogue is laughable (but not in the good way), and not a single character onscreen feels genuine or relatable or human. Here's a twist for you: the man who once showed the promise to be one of this generation's true storytelling masters has become the one thing no would ever have predicted—thoroughly forgettable.

The Happening
20th Century Fox
Rated R; 91 min.

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David Michael Wharton is the managing editor of CS Weekly and a contributing editor of Creative Screenwriting. He still thinks Unbreakable is a good movie, so there.

The Happening courtesy 20th Century Fox

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