The Happening

When titles like “The Event” were already taken. tw: will mention different types of suicides, will start/end paragraph with tw So….that happened. Ha, I’m hilarious. I don’t know if this is cheating or not, but for a while I would watch reviews of movies I haven’t seen or read the wikipedia plot for movies I don’t care to see to get the story without actually seeing the film. And The Happening just happened to be one of them. So I knew from the beginning what the twist was. But what I forgotten from those reviews was how dead and robotic the actors where. Overview: In New York City and all over the Northeast of the U.S, people are performing mass suicide in a daze. Fearful for his family, high school teacher Elliot flees with his wife, friend, and friend’s child to avoid the catastrophe, unaware that the danger is all around them. Let’s get the elephant in the review out of the way first otherwise it’s gonna be on my mind all the time.

Plants did it. I knew that the Plants did it. It was the only thing that I actually retained from my review watching habit. And you know what, when I heard it I knew it was going to be stupid. They came up with some psudo-science bullshit about plant pheramones being so so strong that it affects the self-preservation part of our brains to make us want to kill ourselves. Like, this is just so easy to pick apart with basic scientific and logic. The thing is that I don’t care. I’ve seen bad anime with worse logical reasoning for having the plot happen. Like evil virus that only affect men so there’s like 10 guys left on the planet filled with women. Or waking up on an island via LOST style and having to fight off against giant insects. So I get it. The reasoning of “who did it” or “how did this happened” doesn’t really matter in the context of the movie. The plant thing is dumb, but it is something that I can understand people ignoring it to just enjoy the movie. The Problem is that the rest of the movie is boring as shit.

tw The beginning of the film, Very Beginning, it was interesting. It had me by my seats. People are killing themselves, that’s pretty fuck up. And the movie doesn’t hold back in how fucked up it was. Seeing people just calmly in a daze just stab themselves in the neck with their own hair pin? Like, I had to take a step back. Was not expecting that shit at all. It certainly sets the mood, though I don’t know why they do this…backwards walking thing before they die. To show them being rewired? But my favorite part was with the construction workers dealing with people jumping off the building. That was really emotional to me. You just see the heartbreak during this slowburn of one person jumping, then another, then just 30 in one go. It went from sad to horrific in a great way. tw TOO BAD it was freaking undercut by Matt Wallburg’s science class which killed ALL MOOD that was set up.

You CAN’T set up a thriller movie with the actual scary thing happening, only for the main character to just….completely ignore it/not know it for a long ass time! It ruins the whole thing!! Like, HINTS!!! HINTS ARE A THING!! I thought you were supposed to be good at subtly Shyamalan! Ok, so here’s a quick sidebar. Train to Busan. Great movie. Go watch it. Same director as Parasite. It’s about surviving the zombie apocalypse on a train. Highly recommended. But the thing with THAT movie, is that we get Hints that the zombies exist in the beginning. We get some information that there could be danger, but we don’t SEE the actual zombies until it is too late. HERE, we SEE people literally off themselves in some very realistic ways. You can’t expect me to mood shift that fast to Matt Wallburg just casually teaching about the death of nature and bees! That kills the mood! And makes the main cast look like an idiot because WE know what’s going on, but THEY DON’T!! It’s hard to feel connected to the main characters when we know more than they do. And these characters SUUUUUUUUCK!

Matt…you stink. If I have to judge your acting career based on this movie, I will never watch anything with you in it again. He’s just so boring! And Dull! Everything he says sounds like a blank empty husk of a man. He has the worst reactions to Everything around him. Like a woman accuses him of killed her in her sleep (which is a bizarre scene anyway) and we get THIS God he’s the worst! And this dull-ass line-reading bleeds to every other character!

Apparently her name is actually Alma. And here I thought that it was Emma. Doesn’t matter, did not give a shit about her. I really couldn’t give a shit about the romance. At all. Like, not one ounce. I was actually rooting for them to get a divorce that was so how uninvested I was in them. They are both bland. The whole thing hinged on them working things out and not emotionally cheat I guess, but it just seemed like Emma was getting worked up over Nothing. She ate cake after work with a coworker. Alright. You see her getting calls from him and when she does answer saying “no I love my husband it was just cake we had nothing between us” except it was just the guy talking about all the bad shit happening in whatever area he was. So, again, she just blew things up all out of proportion here.

Then the children….the little child Jess gets a pass. She’s not the greatest, but she’s a tiny child. There’s a lot more things to worry about than her acting. Like the other teen boys they meet while escaping, Jake and John. They have them randomly show up as part of their small group. Only for the Next Scene for them to be killed. Like, what the fuck movie? There’s dramatic tension, then there’s just bad writing. Most of this is just a bunch of bad tiny plot decisions like….why the fuck did they add this in the movie? Just a lot of them trying to add in characterization…but it falls flat so so bad. Humor of Matt talking to a plastic plant? Lame. Trying to distract a person from horrors with a math problem? Possibly could have worked if they actually had any personality of a rock. Matt talking about how he…I guess was thinking of emotionally cheating on his wife with a pharmacist but was just lying…..just why??

Hotdog Man who first said it was the plants to begin with? He actually gets a pass. The hotdog thing is weird as fuck but he seems like the ONLY genuine actual human in this movie. I like Hotdog man. He was just trying his goddamn best. Then different moments of trying to add tension when there shouldn’t really be? Like…some random ass hyper tension of Matt walking into a room that just has a doll? And I guess it is to…MAYBE imply that the old woman is nuts and thinks the doll is actually her daughter? That’s a bit of a stretch coming from me, but that’s all I got for why that scene exists. But that was soooo unneeded, unnecessary, no purpose to the plot for ANY REASON! Like, just….it’s shit like this that’s bad. Look, Disaster Films need 2 things for it to work: A) showing the destruction that the disaster is causing, and B) Showing people trying to survive through said destruction. The Happening has a decent pass for the 1st part, mostly. The suicides are creative and disturbing. Just seeing people randomly grabbing the nearest thing to passively kill themselves does make you step back. Like driving through a street where people hung themselves. Or watching 30 people jump off of buildings. Or a guy sees a nearby lawn mower and just lays down before him. (The one where a dude just sits down casually to cut himself with glass, really fucked me up). It’s the second half that needs work. None of these guys seem to give any actual human responses to that’s going on, whether it was the main cast or any of the side characters. It was like the movie was trying to make everything high tension and that comes off forced, boring, and bizarre. Overall: I was not a fan of this movie. Did not like this movie one way or another. There was so much bad in it, but not in the fun bad. Just bad bad. The only two good things I liked were the Hotdog Man and the beginning scene with the construction workers. That’s it, and it does not save the movie. If you want something similar to this that is a little better, try Cell by Stephen King. Instead of Plants it was Cell Phone reception. Just as ridiculous but a lot more heartfelt and frightening that whatever this mess was.