Eye Candy #93 - "The Happening"

The Happening: Read lots of negative reviews of this one, but I’m a fan of the bulk of M. Night Shyamalan’s films (the exception being “Lady in the Water”), so I figured I’d give it a shot and see what all the hullabaloo was about. The plot – people start to kill themselves en masse, due to exposure to a chemical that reverses the brain’s self-preservation instinct. The people disassociate themselves from reality and then generally going about killing themselves in fairly macabre ways. And **SPOILERS** the culprit of the chemical is plant life, which has, for reasons that aren’t fully elaborated on, hyper-evolved a defense mechanism that’s targeting humanity (there is some speculative science about this very thing, so it’s not completely made up hooey). So why don’t people like “The Happening”? A couple of reasons: 1.) the casting – Mark Wahlberg is fine as the lead, but the female lead, Zooey Deschanel, is miscast and awful here; and 2.) M Night has grossly overestimated his audience’s ability to comprehend what he’s doing when he strays from what they think is his “formula”. This film is like watching a low-budget, 50’s era sci-fi film – the dialogue is stilted, the effects are simple (imagine people running from a field of waving grass like it was pure evil), and the world view is apocalyptic. Your average audience wants more “Sixth Sense”, not B-movie homages (since his demographic skews younger than older and they haven’t seen B-movies). Sure the premise is a little far-fetched, but most summer movie fare is But the film’s tone is sufficiently creepy, the acting serves what the film is trying to be, and it’s watchable and kept my attention. What more do you need? Woodchuck sez, “Check it out.”