Myhowtimeflies!
Just over a year ago, I dragged my friend along to a screening of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening.
I had resolved to come to the cinemas in full support of this director’s bid for redemption, which was highly essential after the box-office bomb that was Lady In The Water.
Alas, not even a sage-acting Mark Whalberg could salvage Shyamalan’s reputation, which had gone on a downward trajectory since 2004’s The Village. The Happening’s critical notices read like those for Mariah Carey’s Glitter or Kevin Costner’s Waterworld.
In the end, Shyamalan’s greatest claims to fame remain 1999’s The Sixth Sense and 2002’s Signs, one of my favorite movies ever. Nevertheless, the box-office returns of The Happening were a tad better than Lady In The Water.
In spite of it all, I cut the film some slack. I mean, Shyamalan himself conceded The Happening should play out like a B movie. (spoiler ahead!) The film’s premise—that the earth’s atmosphere could turn people suicidal—was attractive enough without my sympathy for the director. Somehow, I enjoyed the film, down to James Newton Howard’s haunting score. But a Signs, it is not.
Running with gale force throughout the film was an undercurrent of environmentalism. Near the film’s end, two people on TV were shown debating whether or not the airborne “suicide virus” was nature’s way of avenging humankind’s excesses.
Other than that, Shyamalan never gave the cause of the film’s visceral, apocalyptic scenario. Yet it doesn’t take gusts of killer wind for moviegoers to extract a cautionary tale out of the film.
For all we know, by some mechanism from god-knows-where, the planet could turn against all its human inhabitants. It could decimate every one of us, not caring how large or small our carbon footprints are. In that case, Shyamalan may have made a horror film miles better than An Inconvenient Truth.
Just over a year ago, I dragged my friend along to a screening of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening.
I had resolved to come to the cinemas in full support of this director’s bid for redemption, which was highly essential after the box-office bomb that was Lady In The Water.
Alas, not even a sage-acting Mark Whalberg could salvage Shyamalan’s reputation, which had gone on a downward trajectory since 2004’s The Village. The Happening’s critical notices read like those for Mariah Carey’s Glitter or Kevin Costner’s Waterworld.
In the end, Shyamalan’s greatest claims to fame remain 1999’s The Sixth Sense and 2002’s Signs, one of my favorite movies ever. Nevertheless, the box-office returns of The Happening were a tad better than Lady In The Water.
In spite of it all, I cut the film some slack. I mean, Shyamalan himself conceded The Happening should play out like a B movie. (spoiler ahead!) The film’s premise—that the earth’s atmosphere could turn people suicidal—was attractive enough without my sympathy for the director. Somehow, I enjoyed the film, down to James Newton Howard’s haunting score. But a Signs, it is not.
Running with gale force throughout the film was an undercurrent of environmentalism. Near the film’s end, two people on TV were shown debating whether or not the airborne “suicide virus” was nature’s way of avenging humankind’s excesses.
Other than that, Shyamalan never gave the cause of the film’s visceral, apocalyptic scenario. Yet it doesn’t take gusts of killer wind for moviegoers to extract a cautionary tale out of the film.
For all we know, by some mechanism from god-knows-where, the planet could turn against all its human inhabitants. It could decimate every one of us, not caring how large or small our carbon footprints are. In that case, Shyamalan may have made a horror film miles better than An Inconvenient Truth.
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