The Happening (2008)
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
When a deadly airborne virus threatens to wipe out the northeastern United States, teacher Elliot Moore and his wife Alma flee from contaminated cities into the countryside in a fight to discover the truth. Is it terrorism, the accidental release of some toxic military bio weapon -- or something even more sinister?
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What critics compared The Happening to
Although it is publicly documented that Malerman completed the novel’s rough draft before the release of M. Night Shamalyan’s “The Happening” and the cinematic adaptation of “The Road,” the comparisons to both of these films, and any given post-apocalyptic movie released in the past several decades, cannot help but be drawn regardless.
Adapted from the 2014 post-apocalyptic novel of the same name by Josh Malerman, Bird Box is oddly similar to filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan’s terrible 2008 thriller The Happening.
We’ve seen this kind of post-apocalyptic tale before, and there are bits and pieces that will remind you of The Happening, The Road and A Quiet Place.
The mysterious, invisible force driving people to suicide recalls M. Night Shyamalan’s much-maligned The Happening .
Here, as in M. Night Shyamalan’s far worse “The Happening,” is a movie that deals with two simultaneous fears at once.
If you’ve seen any film where a mismatched group of survivors has to band together to understand and survive an unpredictable and ever growing extinction level event – from Night of the Living Dead to The Mist to The Happening to A Quiet Place – you’ll know every single thing that happens in Bird Box from the moment the plot kicks into gear, and no amount of great direction or nuanced performances will distract from the fact that this has all been done so many times before that I’ve lost count, and that it has been done a whole lot better.
So while moments of The Happening feel like they ape more epic apocalyptic movies like War of the Worlds, the unrestrained tendencies of such stylistics are wisely contained in the service of smaller, more personal catharsis.
It's probably one of the most disappointing endings Shyamalan has delivered, on par with Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds."
Many of the horrific images of the dead remind us of Spielberg's War of the Worlds, and there is a scene in a bedroom right out of Hitchcock's Psycho, as well as images and characters reminiscent of those in The Birds.
In particular, it owes a lot to Shyamalan idol Steven Spielbergâs recent version of War of the Worlds, right down to its focus on an emotionally fractured family trying to come back together (Elliot and Alma, coping with marital problems, end up caring for the daughter of one of Elliotâs colleagues, giving them a greater purpose beyond saving their own lives).
Like War of the Worlds and Cloverfield, The Happening pointedly invokes Sept. 11 in its evocation of Americans reacting to a large-scale, incomprehensible calamity that has no precedent.
In The Happening, the world is faced with an unprecedented crisis, ultimately finding strength in love and community. So too do the characters in Disclosure Day; facing WWIII, the revelation that aliens are real and we are not alone in the universe suddenly has the power to change our destructive course.
Despite there being extensive spoilers everywhere about what OJ is up against, it’s best to see Nope unprepared and spend a healthy amount of time wondering “WTF is going on?!” Suffice to say that Peele draws on a wide range of influences, from the awestruck human befuddlement of Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the eerie, angelic forms of the Japanese TV series Neon Genesis Evangelion , and (accidentally?) the far-too-pleased-with-itself silliness of M Night Shyamalan’s The Happening .
Some of Nope gets goofy in that Shyamalan way, too ( The Happening , The Village ), with the difference being the goofy stuff in Peele’s movie enhances the experience, while Shyamalan often torpedoes his films with such silliness.
En s’inspirant notamment des deux chefs-d’œuvre de Spielberg des années 1970 (Jaws et Close Encounters of the Third Kind) mais aussi de l’univers marqué de certains films de M. Night Shyamalan (Signs et The Happening), Nope est tout sauf une réussite.
And as the story unfolds, it picks up some resonance with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening , though without the tone of extreme self-importance and ridiculous that made that movie so laughable.
But since then -- "Unbreakable," "Signs," "The Village" and the nearly unwatchable "Lady in the Water" -- it's been a slow slide.
From "The Sixth Sense" through the flawed but gripping follow-ups "Unbreakable," "Signs" and "The Village," a couple of things were clear about M. Night Shyamalan: He's a poor actor, an inspired but often arid writer and an athletic director of truly impressive gifts, a born image-maker in the Hitchcock-Spielberg vein.
After kicking off his career with the hugely popular Sixth Sense (and come on, who did see that ending coming?) he went on to the interesting, but flawed, Unbreakable (starring Bruce Willis again).
If it sounds like his last handful of disasters (ultimately, the only Shyamalan that still plays is Unbreakable ), the key difference is that this time around, it's all delivered with a fascinating frustration and rancour.
That's a genuine landmark film, so I am always willing to give him a chance, even after the sodden mess that was Lady in the Water (while The Happening is not as vomit-inducing as the aforementioned, it's no Sixth Sense — or even Unbreakable).
I count that as an improvement over "The Village" and "Unbreakable," each of which concluded with one of the fastest audience stampedes out of a theater I've ever seen.
The Shyamalan film Old most reminded me of was The Happening , the director’s gloriously clunky, weirdly violent thriller about killer trees.
From 2008’s The Happening all the way to 2013’s After Earth , Shyamalan would spend more than half a decade churning out schlocky duds, with the disastrous mega-budget bomb The Last Airbender as a centerpiece.
Things have been looking up for two-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan who began his career with 1999’s The Sixth Sense and gave us decent scares with 2002’s Signs before his career careened off course with Lady in the Water , The Happening (wind as a villain is never a good choice), and After Earth .
Mirroring the same career slump he experienced after the 1-3 punch of The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000) and Signs (2002) with such misfires as The Lady in the Wate r (2006), The Happening (2008), The Last Airbender (2010) and After Earth (2013), Old is coming off the back-end of such recent hits as The Visit (2015) and Split (2016) – seen as something of a career resurgence for the contentious director – once again bringing into question his strength as a filmmaker and storyteller.
Landing somewhere between The Happening and The Village on the Shyamalanometer of Narrative Gimmickry, M. Night Shyamalan’s Old places a dozen or so travelers together on a remote beach, then watches them live the rest of their lives in a day.
It’s hard to overstate what a big deal Shyamalan was in the years that followed the success of The Sixth Sense (1999), or how hard his reputation tanked after The Lady in the Water (2006) and the misunderstood drive-in homage The Happening (2008).
In the fictionalized version of this story, his new film, “Glass,” would complete the return to pop-culture grace from which the director fell in the years after “The Sixth Sense” in 1999, years in which movies like “The Village,” “The Happening,” “The Last Airbender,” and “After Earth” were rightly or wrongly mocked into oblivion.
Shyamalan is up to his old tricks again, the kind of loopy, half-assed filmmaking that made the world scratch its collective head with The Happening, The Village, The Last Airbender, After Earth and Lady in the Water—all wretched stink bombs.
These days, he's met with constant skepticism if not outright derision; after disasters like The Happening (2008), The Last Airbender (2010) and After Earth (2013), the mega-stardom that followed his early works dissolved almost entirely.
Why has the industry constantly given him passes, when he’s done everything – Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender, After Earth – he can to prove his detractors right?
That led to the horror of killer plants in “The Happening,” and then to less personal blunders like “After Earth” and “The Last Airbender.”
Even as the numbers of moviegoers decreased and critics increased with nearly every new Shyamalan release, I stayed with him through “The Village” and “Lady in the Water” and even “The Happening” — but by the time we got to the likes of “The Last Airbender” and “After Earth,” I was off the bandwagon along with just about everyone else.
The director of "The Sixth Sense" and (gulp) "The Happening" delivers a shocker worth his early career hype.
Meanwhile we see alter Barry, the fey fashion designer who visits Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley, "Carrie," "The Happening").
As such I still liked The Happening where he was able to continue that aesthetic.
M. Night Shyamalan’s “Split” is a split decision: It’s not a catastrophe on par with the director’s worst works, marked by the unholy hat trick of “The Happening,” “The Last Airbender” and “After Earth” (triple woof!), but it doesn’t return him to his former “Sixth Sense” glory.
Perhaps as a response to becoming an imitable brand and perhaps down to the muted (and sometimes peculiarly hostile) response to The Village, Lady In The Water and The Happening (all interesting films), Shyamalan moved away from his personal cinema to take shots at fantasy (The Last Airbender), sci-fi (After Earth) and found-footage shocker (The Visit).
What it springs I won't spoil, except to say that it's the most I've laughed at a Shyamalan film since The Happening — but this time, that laughter was on his terms.
Much of that outrage is justified, given duds such as "The Happening," "The Village," "The Last Airbender" and, most certainly, "After Earth."
And the filmmaker's career began to implode, bottoming out with the laughably bad eco-horror The Happening and an artistic gutting of The Last Airbender, which spent $150 million to alienate its entire Nickelodeon fan base.
(Blum actually joined the project after filming wrapped, but it subscribes to his patented “Paranormal Activity” playbook to a T.) Except that the frustrating result winds up on the less haunting end of Shyamalan’s filmography, far south of “The Sixth Sense,” “Signs” and “The Village,” and not even as unsettling as the most effective moments in the hokey “The Happening.”
His subsequent film, The Happening (2008), was also roundly mocked, although I found it to be quite effective and eerily menacing, something I would also say about Devil (2010), the first film in an abandoned horror series that he cowrote.
I never saw "After Earth," so I won't defend that one, but I really do think that "The Happening" in particular, is derided more because people love to say they dislike Shyamalan's films, rather than because its actually bad.
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The story touches on themes of venereal disease, rape, contagion fears, PTSD and more, while combining cinematic influences from zombies, ghosts, slashers, J-horror, conspiracy thrillers, exorcisms, Robert Altman, teen sex comedies, apocalypses, John Carpenter, chase films and the first five minutes of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening into something deeply unsettling and nightmarishly lucid.
Thankfully he's a better science teacher than Mark Wahlberg in "The Happening."
Unabashedly unique and terrifically actedKristen Connolly (2008's " The Happening ") and newcomer Anna Hutchison are equally eye-catching as Dana and Jules, while Chris Hemsworth has famously gone on to make a mark in 2011's " Thor ""The Cabin in the Woods" is an outright blast while still having more on its mind than just a body count.
All the horror movie archetypes are here from the jock ( Thor’s Chris Hemsworth exuding his star in the making charisma), the party girl/slut (Anna Hutchison), the scholar (Jesse Williams, Brooklyn’s Finest ), the stoner (Fran Kranz, Training Day ) and the virginal sweet girl (Kristen Connolly, The Happening ).
Too bad he doesn't trust his talent; you can almost see the moment when he wavers between the terrifying stasis of The Birds and the bogus theatrics of The Happening.
Every gust of wind, every cloud strikes us like the hammer of God - the film reminds me of M. Night Shyamalan's torrid The Happening as filtered through the environmental poeticism of Terrence Malick.
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(Other examples of the microgenre have included Lucy , Fantastic Four , The Happening , and The Gunman .)
Smile was a mash-up of It Follows , Ringu , The Happening, and Birdbox .