M KNIGHT's The Happening

what a sad pathetic film. i dont even know where to begin to critique this thing...

and i am a big fan of m knight too! i feel as though my team just lost game seven of the world series.

i ask those who like this film... where in this movie did you feel anything but sorrow and woe for everyone in it and for everyone who watched it?

the acting... awful. just dreadful. wahlberg looked lost, and not lost as in lost in horror but lost as in what he should be feeling and doing. he seemed to speak when he should've been silent and been silent when he should've spoke. zoey deschannel did the same face the entire movie. i think she was computer generated. dick cheney looks more real. who cared if they were going to make it or not? i couldn't have felt more detached from their fight for survival.

the plot... okay kinda cool idea... a toxin that makes people kill themselves... but really? its spread by the wind? and trees make it? out of nowhere? true, aliens and superheroes and believing that tom cruise can be a spy of any sort all take major leaps of faith but still... the audience will make that leap if there is anything there to leap from and then to arrive to. here there is nothing but an excuse to show people off themselves in the worst ways imaginable. a kinda cool idea which was run right into an obvious gimmick.

the script. anytime the movie got any sort of traction the script just killed it. the dialogue was brutal. almost on purpose brutal. and i think m knight has a terrific ability to write too. what the hell happened here?

the score- usually a total strong point for m knight's films. not even that worked here. it too was off.

all in all there was no pace here. i felt more aware of everything outside of the film than the film itself. not a good thing.
 
Don't compare this to 2001.

If people might recall, I've been one of the main supporters of M. Night Troughout this thread...And I have to admit this one was an inferior film. I'll try to use the common "star" system to do a fast review of all M Night films I've seen so far:

1st- Sixth Sense- Four stars- It was a brilliant thriller, announcing M Nights great directing skills: Acting was top notch (took Willis acting to another level), script was brilliantly entertaining and layered... Very good film.

Unbreakable -3,5 Stars- Fresh and exciting take on the super-hero genre, again cleverly layered. Excelent acting, and M Night seemed much better behind the camera (excelent cinematography). A tinny bit below Sixth Sense due to subject matter. Much more popcorny than Sixth.

Signs- 3 Stars- Great Acting, cinematography, and, again, clever layered story. However, the balance between "fantasy" (Sci-Fi) and reality was just much more unbalanced compared to the former two. The main theme (the invasion) was just not exciting enough, in a time of X-Files saturation, ID-4's, etc. Great Gibson and Phoenix performances. Also, this was the first movie when M. Night's own acting performance was starting to annoy. He was terrible.

The Village- 4 stars- Absolutelly brilliant. Believable story, where all of M Night's creativity comes shinning trough. Beautiful subtext and fantastic performances from Phoenix and the Girl lead. Heartfelt, warm and important movie. Excelent directing. "That" close up frontal Shot, when Joaquin Phoenix character confronts the mentally Ill Character, is shilling.

Lady In the Water- 3,5 stars- This could have been brilliant, if it wasn't for his own casting in one of the major roles. He is a terrible actor (but a great actor's director-go figure). Its impossible in this day and age, for the suspension of disbelief, to not "see" M Night Shyamalan the "director of the Sixth Sense, Signs and the Village" as the character he portraits in this movie. And self casting on "that" role just seems like a pretentious move. However, this was M Night's better shot film. Beautiful camerawork and cinematography. Also, excelent performance from Giammanti and Dallas Howard. And, yes, beautyful story with, again, depth and substance.

The Happening- 2 stars- What Happened? Where's the excelent actors direction? The substance? The great dialogue?

It felt...Shallow, sub-par for someone capable of what he achieved in all his previous films... I'm not going to review it again, since I did it a few pages back, but this just felt...Disconnected.. Lacking effort.

Lets see what comes next. As a fan, however, I can't help but feel really disappointed with this film...
 
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SPZ said:
Don't compare this to 2001.
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I'm not really, haven't even seen The Happening as I mentioned.

I was just trying to make someone else feel better about feeling different than the rest of the pack. :thumbsup:

I just used 2001 as an example of a film that was roasted over the coals when it first came out, just food for thought.

I'll probably wait for video myself. Too much bad press at the moment.
 
For anyone who is questioning the quality of this film. Please consider this one little nugget of filmmaking that DIDN'T end up on the cutting room floor.

In the middle of this epic there was a short scene that involved a woman talking to her daughter on a cell phone. The woman starts by telling her daughter to stay inside. (Note: The wind carries the deadly toxin.) And then the woman says, "What, honey? I can't understand what you're saying?" (Note: The first signs of the toxin are incoherent speech. We know this because it was told to us 50 times!) Then, over the cell phone, we hear some breaking glass and then the daughter screams. She has jumped to her death. Mark Wahlberg then takes the phone, puts it to his ear, and then turns to everyone and says, "I hear wind."

I KID YOU NOT!!! That scene actually made the final cut of the film. And this is from the same guy who gave us "I see dead people." ....Something tells me there will be NO shirts with, "I hear wind." on them.

Anyone trying to defend this piece of junk must have either inhaled the tree toxin or is afraid to admit that they too paid full price to see something this stupid. It's ok. Step One is to just admit the film was bad. Please forgive yourself for seeing it and let the healing begin.

:) :) :)
 
Hey, that was a fun scene. And you left out the best part, especially if you liked "I see dead people." Her incoherent rambling, unless my hearing is really off, was "I see calculus... I... see calculus......I see.... calculus..."

Seems there's no bridging the gap between the folks who liked the movie and those who didn't. It's interesting for me (and probably for folks who hated the movie) to see how completely opposite the opinions can be.
 
Seems there's no bridging the gap between the folks who liked the movie and those who didn't. It's interesting for me (and probably for folks who hated the movie) to see how completely opposite the opinions can be.
Click to expand...

That's an interesting note ullanta; that usually means there's more to it.
 
The bottom line here is I haven't heard anyone say they thought it was a great film. I haven't seen it and probably won't, but the range of opinion seems to be between mildly entertaining and an abomination of cinema, so if the truth is somewhere in between that doesn't bode well.
 
SPZ, I'm surprised you think M. Night is a good actor's director. In every one of his films the only thing he tells his actors is to whisper. He should get Luke Perry for his next film. Luke was a master whisperer on 90210.
 
Batutta said:
The bottom line here is I haven't heard anyone say they thought it was a great film. I haven't seen it and probably won't, but the range of opinion seems to be between mildly entertaining and an abomination of cinema, so if the truth is somewhere in between that doesn't bode well.
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I couldn't agree more, man.:beer:
 
I really can't believe how bad this movie was. Lots of flaws but the biggest one was the acting. I found myself either laughing or cringing through the entire thing. Lots of "are they serious?" moments where the dialog (written and acted) was so offbeat that it just seemed like a big joke.

I found myself thinking that they should've marketed it as part comedy. I don't know it wasn't the worst thing I've ever seen but man is it down there. Acting took me out of it completely, didn't care about the characters because of that, the stories secret was given away before the first 30mins, and the ending was typical.

Bleh.
 
c.g._eads said:
SPZ, I'm surprised you think M. Night is a good actor's director. In every one of his films the only thing he tells his actors is to whisper. He should get Luke Perry for his next film. Luke was a master whisperer on 90210.
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Well, I find the performances (excluding his own and on the Happening) he got from his actors in his previous films excelent. Bruce Willis exceled in the Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, and he brought the talent of Haley Joel Osment to new heights in "The Sixth Sense". Gibson gave one of his better performances in "Signs" (he controlled his over acting(!) very hard feat!), and Joaquin Phoenix exceled both in Signs and In the Village. While Phoenix and Giamanti are excelent dramatic actors, Willis (ok, did a good job in Pulp Fiction, but it was a very "Willis" character- not with the depth of the character of " The Sexth Sense") and even Gibson's performances were signs of excelent actors direction. Bryce Dallas Howard's performance was brilliant in both Lady in the Water and The Village- two very hard roles. Due to the fantastic nature of his films, they do rely strongly on the performances of its actors- they do or break the credibility of the whole film. The line between fantasy and reality is so thin in M Night's films, as well as between main story and "metaphor", that only great acting (and actors) can throw those lines of dialogue in a credible way. And this requires great actor's direction.

Unfortuantely, The Happening fails in this regard, IMO. He just couldn't give the same density and depth to its characters, or make his actors deliver them in the same way his other actors did in his previous films. Call it a deliberate choice, but, the result, for me, was mediocre. That is why a line, like "I hear wind" is nowhere near as effective as "I see dead people". This is, at least IMO, what happens when you take the challenge of walking in the line of mass communication vs auteur filmmaking: its a thin line between a masterpiece and the ridicule. M Night lives on this line, and has been delivering brilliant cinema. However, this time, he couldn't keep the balance, and fell for the later.
 
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PK Gillock said:
...In the middle of this epic there was a short scene that involved a woman talking to her daughter on a cell phone. The woman starts by telling her daughter to stay inside. (Note: The wind carries the deadly toxin.) And then the woman says, "What, honey? I can't understand what you're saying?" (Note: The first signs of the toxin are incoherent speech. We know this because it was told to us 50 times!) Then, over the cell phone, we hear some breaking glass and then the daughter screams. She has jumped to her death. Mark Wahlberg then takes the phone, puts it to his ear, and then turns to everyone and says, "I hear wind."...
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Spoilers (as if that matters anymore)

For myself, the total horribleness of this cluster-poo poo film is summed up just before the (yeah right) "big climax".
Keep in mind this is after:
A) Most of the Northeastern population has died horrible deaths.
B) It has been "determined" that the virus is created by plants and carried on the wind like so many spores,
C) The protags are hunkered down in a house owned by a crazy lady they don't trust.
D) Zooey and the little girl go play willy-nilly in the old "ex-slave hideout" without a care in the world...giggling like school girls in fact.

Also keep in mind this bit of dialogue is delivered through one of those playground "talking pipes" we used to play with (it just as well could have been two tin cans and a string)...

(A menacing wind picks up)
Mark Wahlberg: "Alma close the doors and the windows!"
Zooey Deschanel: Why?



That's right, Zooey...why?
Why indeed.



:thumbdown:thumbdown
 
Batutta said:
The bottom line here is I haven't heard anyone say they thought it was a great film. I haven't seen it and probably won't, but the range of opinion seems to be between mildly entertaining and an abomination of cinema, so if the truth is somewhere in between that doesn't bode well.
Click to expand...


At this point, I'll go ahead and say that The Happening was a really good film. I'd say great in a loose sense (not in a "Citizen Kane" sense). Again, because, thinking back over ALL the movies I've seen in the last year, it's still the one I remember the most of, and that still intrigues me the most. The only one I have any interest in seeing again...
 
I finally saw this film and although I feel it missed the mark in execution and resolution I still enjoyed it. I do like Night's style; somber, deliberate, manipulatiing ...

Not one of his best works, but better than LADY and still worth viewing I think. IN fact, I sit here and think back thus far over 2008 and can't name too many films that grabbed my attention

There were some nice moments in The Happening but I agree, the story got out of hand and lost in the end.
 
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