“Over the last couple years, we’ve decided to culturally reevaluate anything and everything.
This may have started with reevaluating the place of pop music and deciding that pop music is, in fact, good. It’s a valid form of music. The only thing more rock solid than Britney’s abs in the early 2000’s was her songwriting.
It’s been fun to go back and say, Hey, maybe Garth Brooks was pretty legit, even though he was ignored because he worked in the Country genre. Or, Gee, maybe comic books from the 90’s were legitimately artsy.
But this reevaluation may be getting out of hand, or maybe we’ve just run out of stuff to reevaluate. Because now I’m seeing several articles about M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening with headlines like this:
Hear me out: why The Happening isn’t a bad movie
Why M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening Doesn’t Deserve Its Bad Reviews
The Happening is Super Dope and Anyone Who Says Otherwise is Going to Get A Happening-esque Comeuppance, Probably In Being Dropkicked By a Douglas Fir, And Also By My Friend, Douglas Fir, Who Just So Happens To Have The Same Name As A Variety Of Tree
Okay, I made up that last one, but there’s no shortage of articles defending The Happening out there, and they even have some quotes like this:
But what I find particularly resonant about The Happening, especially in these pandemic times, is the way it brings to bear the frailty of human knowledge, how easily our scientific and civilizational advances topple when confronted with something that eludes understanding.
Ooooookay.
Because of all this reversal, I decided to bravely wade into The Happening, watch it for real, and reevaluate the reevaluations to find out if what people are saying is true: Is The Happening a secret success?
Conclusion
No. The Happening is very bad.
you want more than that? Okay, fine.
Watching The Happening
I have to shamefully admit that I’ve never sat down and watched The Happening before.
Wait, why is that shameful? I’ve climbed a 14er. A few of ˜em! I’ve stood on 3 of 7 continents, which isn’t a TON, but it’s not bad. Why am I ashamed of never seeing The Happening?
Well, because it’s bad movie royalty. And I discovered why.
Spoiler Section
The story of The Happening is thinner than my patience in waiting for my work to open up a donut stand inside the building where I work.
The film opens, and people start committing suicide in grisly ways, seemingly while in a trance. And it turns out this happening is because plant life is releasing, I don’t know, goofy gas? Some kind of goofball gas that makes people kill themselves?
This is a self-protective measure taken by the trees, a way to maybe prevent them from all being turned into whatever people are turning trees into these days. According to my Instagram feed, that’d mostly be wood tables with colored, poured resin rivers running through them.
That’s pretty much it. We get that setup in the first third of the movie, and it never really goes anywhere from there.
Imagine the plot of a typical movie, like Raiders of the Lost Ark. A thing happens, this causes another thing to happen, and so on until the last thing happens: a Nazi’s whole head melts, and everything is cool again.
The Happening is not like that. In The Happening, ONE THING happens, and then a bunch of people walk around in a world where that thing continues happening, but not to our main characters for some reason.
Huh. Maybe that’s why it’s called THE Happening. It’s singular, only one thing happens.
But it’s not the plot that makes The Happening so bad. It’s a bunch of smaller things
Small Thing: The Talking
All the talking in this movie is weird.
Sometimes it feels like no two actors were ever in the same room, doing their dialog at the same time.
You see this in Birdemic. What the filmmakers did there is film one actor doing all of his lines for a scene, then film the other actor doing all of her lines for the scene, then cut them together (the problem in that movie is that an air conditioning unit kicked on during one of the actor’s shots, so the ambient noise between the two shots is really different, and every time the shot switches from one character to the other, you get this loud BWAAAHHHHH!!!! of an A/C unit. There is a way to cheat this: first you reduce the sound in both clips to try and remove excess noise, then you add in an ambient noise track, in this case, the sort of noises you’d hear in a diner, that plays constantly and without cuts beneath the entire scene. That way, the small difference between the two tracks will be covered up, and the noise won’t noticeably change between the two. But now we’re getting into fixing Birdemic, and we don’t have enough time to do that here. That’s why film school was invented).
In The Happening, it’s not that there are jarring audio or visual differences when characters are talking, it just FEELS like the actors don’t know what is going on, why they’re saying the things they’re saying, who they’re talking to it’s like they don’t know anything. Like the whole thing was filmed one person at a time.
Small Thing Two: Saying What’s (The) Happening
You’ll see this sometimes in screenwriting, especially if it comes from people who are used to writing novels and so on: the writer forgets that the images can do some of the explaining.
In other words, when you see something Happening, you don’t need a character to say exactly what is Happening because you see it occurring as well.
Small Thing Three: The News
One of my pet peeves (has anyone named a rowdy kitten Peeves? Seems appropriate) is when a movie or TV show decides to do all of the explaining by having news anchors on TV just straight-up say what’s going on all the time.
This happens constantly in The Happening. Someone has the news on, and the person on the news is like, Here’s exactly what’s happening to you, Mark Wahlburg’s character, whose name I can’t remember because why bother?
What’s funny about this whole news thing is how readily we accept it in movies, yet in real life this has NEVER happened to me once. I guess that’s the difference between being famous and not being famous: The news might focus on you, what you’re doing, and what’s going on in your life if you’re famous.
Somehow, I doubt I’ll ever turn on the news and hear, Okay, Pete, dentist appointment today is looking good, though you’ve got some buildup on those back molars again.
The Most Redeeming Factor
Some of the movie is just weird, and it’s what I find most redeeming.
There’s the famous Hot dog guy, who just decides to tell everyone:
“We’re packing hot dogs for the road. You know hot dogs get a bad rap? They got a cool shape, they got protein. You like hot dogs right?”
A cool shape? Does this guy see “cool” and “penis-y” as the same? And who describes penis-shaped as a “cool” shape? Arousing, sure. Disturbing sometimes, arousing others, definitely. But cool?
There’s also a weird semi-affair Zooey Deschanel is having with some guy named Joey, but she insists they just met up and ate tiramisu. Which, TBH, I would forgive my partner for doing. Tiramisu is delicious, and I don’t feel like it pops up all the time. When you have the chance to eat it, you should take it, deal with the emotional fallout later.
The Elephant Grass In The Room
I’m pretty sure the original reevaluation of The Happening came from Onion A/V Club’s Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, who posed the theory that The Happening is meant to be a campy, 50’s-style B-movie, and therefore its failure is actually a secret success.
Basically: The Happening’s attempt to be like a lousy movie with wooden acting and bizarre dialogue and no story is successful, and if it was TRYING to do that, it succeeded.
I say this is nonsense. Poppycock. Banana oil. Other anachronistic things that mean manure. See, I can use words like anachronistic, too. I’m a bigtime film guy. Look at me!
Because the thing is, someone already made a movie that relies on 50’s drive-in movie stylings that still manages to be good, scary, fun, and doesn’t come off as being horrible: Frank Darabont’s The Mist.
That movie was originally meant to be screened in black and white, and if you can find a copy in black and white, I recommend it. The effects look better, and it’s clear this was the intended style of the movie. The mist has never looked mistier.
What Darabont did is to pull some of the tropes of 50’s movies that still work, but he left behind those that didn’t. For example, outrageously bad acting.
Also, Darabont didn’t skimp on having bizarre monsters. The Happening’s monster is literally the wind. It’s as scary as an unsmellable fart.
And, I mean, come on, The Happening. It was supposed to be that way has to be the weakest excuse for making a crappy movie that anyone has ever heard of. When I burned Bagel Bites in the oven so badly that they looked like little lumps of coal, the I meant to do that excuse didn’t make those Bagel Bites any tastier. Nothing could salvage those Bagel Bites. I hate throwing out food, especially when it’s pizza-adjacent, so the Burned Bagel Bites Incident of 2017 still haunts me to this day. I see them every time I close my eyes
If The Happening was meant to be crappy, then it succeeded, but that doesn’t mean the movie itself is a success. It still sucks.
Birdemic-ing
Here’s the big thing that makes The Happening feel irredeemable to me: The Happening and the aforementioned Birdemic are, essentially, the same movie.
Both have an environmental message that, while correct, doesn’t make up for much.
Both have really bad acting.
Both have a premise that comes into play, and then people just sort of walk around in the premise.
And when the closest comparison to your movie is Birdemic, we’ve got a problem.
Especially because Birdemic cost $10,000, and The Happening cost somewhere between $60 and $80 MILLION.
One Good Thing About The Happening
I must admit, even though The Happening was bad, it doesn’t seem to have ruined any careers the way some stinkers do.
Mark Wahlberg has gone on to be in a movie starring a living teddy bear. By which I mean: He was in Pain & Gain with Dwayne The Rock Johnson. But I guess he was also in Ted, which starred a living teddy bear. If you ever need a guy to star alongside a human-like teddy bear or a teddy-bear-like human, Marky Mark is your boy.
Zooey Deschanel out-manic-pixie-dream-girl-ed Natalie Portman, the original manic pixie dream girl, in 500 Days of Summer. Not to mention her sitcom, New Girl, which is a delight. Also, she appeared alongside her real-life sister, Emily, on Emily’s on-going series, Bones. The two real-life sisters played second cousins who don’t see the resemblance, which is hilarious.
John Leguizamo? Dude is working A LOT, and he’s made a fine career of popping up in great movies (Encanto, John Wick 2), and some movies that are Land of the Dead.
And M. Night Shyamalan?
The Happening might have been the official end of his run of successes. But he’s found a new niche in movies with lower budgets and smaller stories.
And I like these smaller Shyamalan’s. They make me feel like he’s back in the groove. Like he’s a filmmaker with class and distinction again.
Like The Visit, a movie in which a used diaper is shoved in a teen’s face for horror purposes.
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