Today’s Rant: The Happening…?

Look, I know with a movie entitled “The Happening” there’s only so much you can expect. It’s like trying to take what will clearly be a disastrous event and try to make it sound less like a disaster movie by adding  hint of esoterica to it. Something happened…but what?

Feh.

Anyway, I avoided this movie since I haven’t really liked anything of Mr. Shyamalan’s since Unbreakable, but as I was somewhat bored last night, I watched it through, thinking that at least there would be some weirdness if nothing else, and weird is good.

And as far as that went, it delivered. But the massively implausible premise actually interfered with my enjoyment of the movie. This rarely happens to me. When other people tell me they have trouble suspending disbelief in a movie, I just shrug and say “It’s a movie. You’re always suspending disbelief because it isn’t real.” But in this rare case, it was immediate obvious to me what the problem was.

I hardly think I’ll ruin anything whatsoever to tell you that the main idea is that the plants on Earth are collectively and spontaneously producing a laughably complex neurotoxin to punish humans for…uh…something. Amazing that it took four hundred thousand years. Our fault for cutting down the trees right? Er…anyway. This neurotoxin apparently makes you kill yourself in the most convenient and brutal manner to hand. While it shuts off rational faculties for things like self-preservation and speech and memory centers, you still apparently can operate motor vehicles or climb up a ladder, tie a noose knot, and hang yourself.

I will say that the images of such emotionally blank and creepy mass suicides are definitely disturbing. That aspect of the movie is done well, and I was still thinking about some of the more well-shot scenes later the next morning.

But a disaster/horror movie tries to bring you in by letting you feel danger vicariously through the characters. But the unbelievably unlikely scenario of all types of plants producing an impossibly complex neurotoxin that just happens to turn humans into creepy suicidal drones instead of even simply making them drop dead on the spot is so utterly ridiculous I simply cannot be scared by it. Obviously M. Night Shyamalan dreamed up these odd scenarios of mass suicide and had to come up with some sort of malevolent force to justify their happening. So plants have it in for humans. If only we’d been nicer to them. After all, plants react to human stimulus – so surely they could all gang up on us by, despite vastly different chemistry and genetics by all creating the appropriate apparatus to produce naturally which the most fervent mad scientist could only dream of.

And considering how fast people drop dead in the movie, about twenty minutes in everyone seems completely screwed. And point of fact, they were, since apparently the entire Northeast was wiped out except for the three main characters. Then it’s like, three months later, and everything is back to normal, some expert on TV warns us that the first one was the sign of a bigger attack to come, and then another “Happening” happens in Paris or something, and then you realize that we’re doomed, thanks to these needlessly malevolent shrubs. It’s also to hard to be scared when you know no one is going to make it out alive.

I sure learned a lesson from that movie. I’ll never be mean to a ficus again.

Feh.