{"id":939,"date":"2008-06-17T16:40:45","date_gmt":"2008-06-17T22:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/17\/the-happening-aint-happening"},"modified":"2008-06-17T16:40:45","modified_gmt":"2008-06-17T22:40:45","slug":"the-happening-aint-happening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/17\/the-happening-aint-happening","title":{"rendered":"The Happening Ain’t Happening"},"content":{"rendered":"

We just saw The Happening<\/em>, the new film by M. Night Shyamalan. Let me state up front that I really like his previous movies. The excellence of The Sixth Sense<\/em> goes without saying but I loved Signs<\/em> and The Village<\/em> also and certainly enjoyed Unbreakable<\/em> and Lady in the Water<\/em>. Hence it pains me to say that his newest film is really not very good. Coming from any lesser filmmaker it would be so-so; coming from him it’s a major disappointment.<\/p>\n

I’m not going to say much about the plot since I personally hate it when someone spoils the plot of a movie for me. I suppose, though, that this review is something of a spoiler in itself. What I’ll say is this: it has a (mostly) very good, strange, suspense-laden build-up, and then it utterly fails to deliver. In retrospect it comes off as a few interesting ideas and some resulting odd situations thrown together in the framework of two plots competing for supremacy, and the competition ends in a draw.<\/p>\n

I will say this: if you have any interest in seeing it, you might as well see it in a theater rather than waiting for the DVD. There are some nice bits of cinematography (although nothing as spectacular as, say, the night scene in The Village<\/em> with the villagers moving through the houses with the dolly camera tracking them) whose impact would be diminished to nearly nothing on a small screen. On the other hand, those scenes might not be worth the trip to the theater. There were certain aspects of the camera work that I found annoying. I was entirely weary of the close-up-on-face-through-wide-angle-lens gimmick even before the film ended. That’s the first time I can recall being actually annoyed by camera work in one of his films.<\/p>\n

Mark Wahlberg might be the movie’s strongest point. He’s a good actor; given his youth he might well be an excellent actor down the road. His character is at least convincing, which is more than can be said for many of the others. James Newton Howard did a nice job on the score. It’s not stunning but it works.<\/p>\n

I dunno. Maybe I missed the point altogether, but as far as we could tell, if the movie had a point, it’s been made many times over in much simpler ways, and without completely letting down the audience.<\/p>\n

I’ll make a couple of other pithy comments in the Comments section which will probably be spoilers, so don’t look at the Comments for this post until you’ve seen the movie, if you think you’re going to do so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We just saw The Happening, the new film by M. Night Shyamalan. Let me state up front that I really like his previous movies. The excellence of The Sixth Sense goes without saying but I loved Signs and The Village also and certainly enjoyed Unbreakable and Lady in the Water. Hence it pains me to… Continue reading The Happening Ain’t Happening<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/939\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}