Review: The Happening Continues Shyamalan's Downward Spiral

I still remember the first time I saw writer-director M. Night Shyamlan's The Sixth Sense, if only because I couldn't help but feel like I had just witnessed the grand introduction of cinema's next great commercial director -- in other words, my generation's Steven Spielberg or Alfred Hitchcock.

It was 1999 and the movie had built up substantial buzz since its release, though astonishingly enough, nobody was giving away the now-infamous twist ending. Hell, twist endings were still such a novel concept that I had written the same twist ending into two of my earliest screenplays without knowing they were, in fact, "twists." My protagonists discovered they were angels in the concluding moments of my stories -- but that's beside the point. I sat through The Sixth Sense having written the exact same ending twice, even following some of the same plot beats to get there, and somehow I was still shocked by the Bruce Willis character's true nature. This is why I'm so bothered by Shyamalan's latest, The Happening.

I don't expect twists anymore. I just expect good storytelling. And Shyamalan's skills as a storyteller have been on the decline ever since The Sixth Sense.

Gone are my hopes that he's the next Spielberg or Hitchcock. That space in my heart has been replaced by the hope that Shyamalan can make another movie that will compare to The Sixth Sense or its follow-up, Unbreakable, which has never been unanimously praised, though it deserves to be. His latest is not that film, not by a long shot.

In The Happening, the northeastern U.S. is struck by what at first is assumed to be a terrorist-implemented biological agent that blocks the human danger sense -- driving all who come in contact with it to kill themselves by, say, leaping off buildings or laying down under an industrial lawnmower. Mark Wahlberg plays Elliot Moore, a Philadelphia science teacher who, with his wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel), tries to flee the infected area. It's not long before they discover that the source of the mass attack is not terrorists, but is in fact -- well, I can't really say it here. The previews keep it a secret for a reason, even if the movie reveals the real culprits by the end of the first act. That's right, Shyamalan delivers his "twist ending" at the end of the first act this time. The rest of the movie is a quest to figure out how to stay alive, even though that stops being interesting halfway through. So much so that the director even opted to fill the second half of the 90-minute movie with random human threats, rather than focusing on the real one. And of course, there's the Shyamalan's beloved communication theme that must be explored ad nauseum; here, in the final act, Elliot and Alma finally open up to each other across a field via a Civil War-era talking tube. Not as effective as Willis's dead psychologist trying to communicate with his living fiancée, but Shyamalan had to toss it in because he obviously has trouble opening up in his personal life.

Long story short: The Happening is a bland movie with a few great scares and some wonderfully taut suspense sequences -- but it lacks any real conclusion and doesn't seem to know what to do with itself outside of being a cool idea for a sci-fi short story. What happened to you, Shyamalan? Hell, that's the real mystery of The Happening.

Grade: C

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