Warning: spoilers!!!
I would like to dedicate this review to my good friend Philipp, who has the worst taste in films of anyone I know (sorry dear, but you do), and whose immediate reaction to my whining about having to see
The Happening was: "Cool, I wanted to see it anyway, so why don't you come over tomorrow, and we'll watch it together". So that's what I did, because I figured it would be best to just get this over with as soon as possible. I don't know if I could have made it through the film without someone by my side to watch it with me.
Ok, now: lotr-sam? This was really cruel of you. Throughout the film I was wondering how anyone could enjoy this film. My first thought was that you must have been drunk enough to find the awfulness of the film hilarious, but then I remembered that it was you who dictated it to me, and I really thought it could be the random shots of trees that we get throughout this film. Surprise, surprise,
The Happening is actually a Terrence Malick film in disguise!
I just checked if you had written anything about the film around here, and you had:
I saw it opening day. Yes it was blighted with awful acting and a crappy script but I enjoyed it anyway. What really disappointed me wasn't the story but the lack of any visual style. Every other M. Night film has oozed with style but here it feels like he just grabbed a camera and the actors and shot the film without any regard for lighting, set design or color. It's one of the blandest films I've ever seen.
That being said I enjoyed seeing random people off themselves and thought the ending was good. There I said it. Now you can all hate me!
Turns out you didn't care for the visual side of the film at all - so all these gorgeous trees did nothing for you?? Heck, even I found the opening credits beautiful, where we get nothing but clouds in a blue sky for two whole minutes.
So what you did enjoy were all these people offing themselves. I'll grant you that I had never seen anything like this before, and that it was quite effective in creeping me out and creating a sense of dread as to the many ways people would come up with to kill themselves. There was no way that I (wuss that I am) was going to get any enjoyment out of that, though.
The first of these scenes involves a number of construction workers throwing themselves off a tall building - this scene was completely horrifying to me, and I would probably have turned off the movie then and there had I not watched it with my friend (and we hadn't even gotten to the parts of the film that are horrible because of the terrible script and bad acting!). So yeah, lots and lots of graphic ways to die after this point - hated every second of that.
Is there really a point for me to get into the bad script, bad filmmaking and bad acting? I don't know if I have the energy for that, but I'll try and make a few more points.
If I had had any hope to enjoy this film on some level, I thought it would come from watching Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel, two performers that I really like. No such luck. I felt that Wahlberg at least managed to pull off a mediocre performance, but Deschanel was completely dragged down to the level of crapitude of the material. One bad line-reading after another, it was painful to watch...
The one marginally good thing I can say about the film is that it was somewhat effective in building up a little suspense and creeping me out (even though I don't enjoy being creeped out as much as many others do). But I was then completely let down by the end of the film. The characters work their way towards a theory about what's causing the events, and that turns out to be the right one, so there is no big reveal at the end. I don't know what you, sam, mean exactly when you say you liked the ending. Was it that short final scene in Paris? I didn't like that at all, I thought it was a cheap trick that has been used hundreds of times before: "Phew, it is over. Or
is it?"
Ok, I think that's enough. For the first time since I've been doing this MDC-thing, I'm not thanking my dictator at the end of my write-up, I'm just sitting here shaking my head, wondering how anyone can have enjoyed this total mess of a movie.