“The Happening,” sad to say, sucks. I say “sad” because I generally like M. Night Shyamalans work. But “The Happening” is massively flawed. How so? Well, on one hand it’s jam-packed with a “deep ecologists” hatred of humanity. On the other, the science just plain sucks.
Taking the first point: in the movie, an airborne toxin appears that causes people to off themselves in all manner of ways, interesting and mundane. Now, the general premise of some weirdness that causes people to go buggo and kill themselves en masse certainly could be interesting on a dramatic level… the idea is just jam packed with horror potential. Had the cause been aliens, Satan, Cthulhu or any of a host of other evils villains, this could have been a dandy movie. But instead, the source of the toxin is *trees.* They’re pissed off at mankind. The point is expounded on in unambiguous terms at the end of the movie that humans are just plain bad for Earth, and it’d be better for life if we were gone. There are some whackjobs in the fringes of the environmental movement who buy into this rubbish; but if the trees were really pissed, they’d attack in the Pacific Northwest or, better, the Amazon. Certainly not Central Park. Secondly, in the long term humans are the best thing terrestrial life has ever encountered. Sure, we make a mess of things. But without humans, Earthly life will die when Earth dies… be that a century from now when a state-sized asteroid plows into Earth, or billions of years from now when the Sun dies. But with humans, life has the chance of spreading thoughout the cosmos, from asteroid colonies to terraformed deadworlds. Bunnies and trees sure as hell ain’t gonna pull off that stunt on their own.
Let me put it this way: People being compelled to off themselves is supposed to be EVIL. So having the compeller be trees, whom we are supposed to see not as malign but harmless, puts a whole different spin on it than if it was, say, demons. In “The Happening,” the bad guys turn out to be all of humanity.
Bah.
The second point: The science was just, well, stupid. Yes, some plants will emit toxic fumes that are targeted at specific threatening animal species. But the production of these chemicals is an evolutionary process that takes many generations; some industrious oak in a park is vastly unlikely to just stumble across a chemical that will cause humans – and only humans – to kill themselves. At best, it might start cranking out some generally nasty chemical that irritates (or in high enough concentration, kills) animals. If it’s really lucky, it’ll take out mammals, and not birds and insects. But something that specifically targets humans? And with many plant species picking up the hint and, in the words of the expert quoted at the end of the film, “evolving” to produce the same toxin *and* evolving actual strategies for taking down groups of humans?
Evolution does not work that way!
Bah!
Science literacy is bad enough in the US… and then we have Hollywood cranking out nonsense that makes it even worse. Space travel in sci-fi is almost always dead wrong. But whether or not ships in space go “whoooosh” when they fly by is not a topic of political import. But Hollywood, which is full of people who regularly talk smack about Creationists, proceeds to produce nonsense that points out that they don’t understnad the most basic concepts underlying natural selection and Darwinian evolution either.
Beyond those issues, the movie has a number of other flaws. There are three main characters: Elliot (Mark Wahlberg), his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) and Elliots friend/co-worker Julian (John Leguizamo). First: Elliot is a high school science teacher who seems to be a woo-woo New Ager. Second: Julain dislikes Alma, for reasons which are never explained. Third: Alma is just odd. Fourth: Wahlberg needs acting lessons.
