06.29.08
Lee1990 Movie Review - The Happening
M. Night, we barely knew ye. This one may very well bury his career and shows that he has been fully contaminated by the leftist taint in Hollyweird.
The most disappointing thing about this cinematic fiasco is that it could have been so good if all the eco-preaching garbage had been left out. The movie is structured very similarly to Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, The Birds, in that it is about a normally benign part of nature that suddenly turns hostile to mankind. In this case, the plant life of New England suddenly begins to emit a toxin that reverses the normal human instinct to self-preserve into an instinctual drive to self-destruct, resulting in suicides by whatever means are most immediately available (one poor shmuck runs himself over with an industrial sized lawnmower in the most graphic scene in the movie.) Our eco-heroes discover that of course this is our fault, most likely due to the large number of nuclear plants in New England.
When I discovered I had been duped into watching eco-trash instead of a supernatural thriller, I almost considered demanding a refund. This movie could have been as good a scare movie as The Birds, but M. Night was so concerned with his insipid eco-preaching that he forgot that what made The Birds so frightening was that the homicidal behavior of the seagulls that attacked the town was never explained; it was simply an unexplainable and uncontrollable force of nature.
I have never said this about any film, but do not go see this movie, do not buy this movie, do not rent this movie. If Hollywood is to learn that we do not want this preachy, hysterical eco-trash foisted off on us again and again, we must punish them for making it by giving them flop after flop until they learn.
A perfect 10 on the dud meter.
