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The Happening, don't believe the hype, nothing happened really.'

The Happening' written and directed by M Night Shymalan who was also responsible for the The Sixth Sense' and Signs' was one of the highly awaited films of the year, mostly due to the director's previous out put.
Therefore, I went to see The Happening' with high hopes however this good feeling didn't last as the film turned from bad to worse. It didn't help that my friend I went to see the film with started laughing within the first five minutes, and as there is no comedy in this film this is a bad sign.

Watching people just walking straight off the top of a multi storey building should be chilling and upsetting to watch but when you have people at the bottom with faces like clowns and acting like they've just been hit with a pie as they watch their friends fall makes it very hard not to laugh.

The action seemed to start straight away but then didn't go any where, we are told that the trees and vegetation are attacking humans in the north east part of the USA, but we are not told why, the answer they come up with in the film is that it's an act of nature and although scientists will think up some kind of theory as to why it happened, no one will ever really know. This just seems lazy to me, the idea that no one will ever know is valid enough, but that doesn't make a good film. What if we were told in Independence Day that the aliens were attacking but no one will ever really know why and we should just run away? Not a great plot is it.

And that is all they do in the film, run and hide, no fighting or analysis of what is going on, they are simply running. I think the director was trying to show the human effects of this kind of terror, how we cope with disaster and trauma, however he could have done it better by picking actors who could act, Mark Wahlberg spent most of the film with a pathetic look on his face and the only shots we ever got of Zooey Deschanel, his on-screen wife, was of her permanently startled looking blue eyes. The subplot of their failing marriage was laughably wooden, cranking in to fill the gaps between running and hiding, and you felt no sympathy for either character, indeed, you didn't feel much through out the entire film.

The finale of the film, where the young couple decide to walk in to the dangerous area so that they could die together, is totally unrealistic, they had a child with them, their best friend's daughter, would they really have put her in danger like that, it goes against every instinct of protection. And then nothing happens, the finale is no finale and they all just go home.

The crazy old woman they meet in the middle of the film provides the only bit of interest, but this soon dissolves as she turns in to just another atypical American batty old woman who has a suspicious looking doll on her bed and has spent too much time on her own, and then she conveniently kills herself when she starts getting troublesome so there is no real suspense there.

I came out of the film feeling like I hadn't connected with any of the characters and the story was too far fetched to make me believe in that either. If the plants are attacking humans why don't they just kill us outright with their toxins rather than making us kill ourselves, watching someone throw themselves in to a lion's cage at the zoo and taunting the lions, might have seemed like a clever twist in the beginning but it soon became laughable and then, sadly, less than laughable

Learn more about this author, Amy Cradock.
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