Disclaimer on this film review: I love M Night Shymalan and everything he's done since 6th sense.
The Happening as you probably know is a disaster movie with various cities being attacked by a....thing. An airborn toxin that causes you to kill yourself. The movie shows you this straight away so it is not a spoiler. M Night sets up some very awesome, very eerie and deeply disturbing set pieces of people realising what's happening at different places within New York City.
The story is a good one, War of the Worlds style survival by running away. The terror that it will catch up with you, the question of why it is happening.
My only real complaints are to do with the act. I ingreally liked Zooey Deschenal but I'm just not sure that Mark Wahlberg was the right guy for the lead. He didn't really sell a lot of the emotions he was meant to. I bet M Night would have rather had Mel Gibson back but he would have been too old for the role. Also the little girl was pretty wooden a lot of the time.
Lee thought the message was pretty heavy handed, but I figure you couldn't have told that story any other way.
It was scary and tense and good.
Posted by jenni at June 13, 2008 09:34 AM