The Hap­pen­ing is the lat­est in a long line of Hol­ly­wood movies that depict attacks of one sort (ter­ror­ist) or another (alien) upon New York City. A mys­te­ri­ous mass hys­te­ria strikes the idyl­lic Bethesda Ter­race (a place I walk through sev­eral times a week) in Manhattan’s Cen­tral Park, and quickly fans out to the entire city. What is later referred to as “the event” or “the hap­pen­ing” (the lat­ter a term pop­u­lar­ized by hip­pies, I believe) appears to be some kind of air­borne toxin that causes every human being within range to calmly and pas­sively com­mit sui­cide. Speak­ing as a New Yorker that lived through 9/11, this open­ing sequence pushes fewer emo­tional but­tons than, say Clover­field (read The Dork Report review), which was explic­itly anal­o­gous to post-9/11 New York as Godzilla was to post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan. But it’s impos­si­ble to not be shaken by the charged image of office work­ers will­ingly jump­ing to their deaths from skyscrapers.

Hav­ing ticked the dis­as­ter movie genre box of “whole­sale mas­sacre in Man­hat­tan,” writer/director/producer M. Night Shya­malan aban­dons New York for the remain­der of the movie and trans­fers the action to his old stomp­ing grounds of Philadel­phia, PA. High school teach­ers Eliot (“Marky” Mark Wahlberg) and Julian (John Leguizamo) catch wind (so to speak) of the event, and pre­sciently make plans to take the next Amtrak train out of 30^th Street Sta­tion with their fam­i­lies. Eliot is expe­ri­enc­ing some fric­tion in his mar­riage with Alma (Zooey Deschanel), and warns Julian that she may be act­ing “weird.” It’s up to the viewer to decide if he’s talk­ing about the char­ac­ter Alma or the actress Zooey, whose eyes and face were truly made for the movies but whose eccen­tric line read­ings are indeed “weird.”

Beau­ti­ful down­town Fil­bert, PA

The train halts on the way from Philly to Har­ris­burg, strand­ing the occu­pants in the mid­dle of nowhere — which is to say, the real-life small town Fil­bert, PA. Sci­ence teacher Eliot berates him­self “be sci­en­tific, douchebag!” and uses logic to deduce the facts from the bits of evi­dence he’s picked up along the way: his hunch is that they are not expe­ri­enc­ing a ter­ror­ist chem­i­cal attack, but rather that the earth’s bios­phere is releas­ing a fatal toxin tar­geted to areas heav­ily pop­u­lated by humans. They set off on foot in small groups into the kind of beau­ti­ful rolling fields where Shya­malan set his ear­lier para­ble The Vil­lage (read The Dork Report review).

They come across a for-sale “Model Home”, a giant McMan­sion full of arti­fi­cial good­ies. The per­fect dream home is actu­ally in no way a refuge: there is no food or shel­ter, and it only serves as a lure to other groups less enlight­ened than they; the mere arrival of even one more fel­low trav­eller could boost the local pop­u­la­tion to a point where the plants may attack. Here The film’s first hint of humor appears: Eliot notices a giant indoor plant eerily loom­ing in a cor­ner. He attempts to nego­ti­ate with it for the future of human­ity, until he real­izes that it too is plas­tic. The arti­fi­cial model home is a blunt metaphor for humanity’s dis­pos­able con­sumerism and impact upon the environment.

Man­hat­tan is destroyed for the 4,937^th time by Hollywood

At this point, The Hap­pen­ing becomes a dif­fer­ent movie, a bet­ter one, receiv­ing a much-needed injec­tion of Shyamalan’s char­ac­ter­is­tic wit and mas­ter­ful use of hor­ror and sus­pense tropes: creepy shad­ows half glimpsed through win­dow slats, batty old lady (Betty Buck­ley) with creepy dolls in her bed, etc. But over­all it’s unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally clumsy. His best films (for my money: The Sixth Sense, Unbreak­able, and Signs) are plot­ted so tight you couldn’t remove a sin­gle frame with­out harm­ing them.

It’s unfor­tu­nately over­writ­ten with pages and pages of poor dia­logue, includ­ing this unin­ten­tional howler fea­tured in the trailer: note Marky Mark’s impec­ca­ble gram­mar upon being told his Amtrak train has lost con­tact: “With whom?” Julian also states with odd for­mal­ity that his wife is trav­el­ling sep­a­rately to “the town of Prince­ton.” To be char­i­ta­ble, per­haps Shya­malan fig­ured high school teach­ers might habit­u­ally speak clearly with cor­rect grammar.

Do we have time for a cheeses­teak and some Antie Anne’s before our train to nowhere?

There’s too strong a reliance on fake tele­vi­sion news broad­casts to con­vey expo­si­tion (a device only resorted to once or twice in Signs), even con­clud­ing the film with a talk­ing head sci­en­tist explain­ing the take­away mes­sage for the slower mem­bers of the audi­ence: “we’re threat­en­ing the planet.” Watch The Sixth Sense and Unbreak­able again and see how much Shya­malan at his best is able to com­mu­ni­cate with­out dia­logue. How much would Unbreak­able have sucked if Bruce Willis’ char­ac­ter had openly mused about how he was turn­ing into Superman?

Sig­nif­i­cantly for a direc­tor known for work­ing in the hor­ror & sus­pense gen­res (fan­tasy, too, if you count the exe­crable mis­step The Lady in the Water — read The Dork Report review), The Hap­pen­ing is Shyamalan’s first R-rated movie. As if to live up to its hor­ror film billing, the nar­ra­tive fre­quently pauses for con­spic­u­ously gory set-pieces: a woman stabs her­self with a knit­ting nee­dle, a man sets a lawn mower to run over him­self, etc. The brief episodes of gore con­trast with what must have been the major chal­lenge for his story: to visu­al­ize some­thing inher­ently invis­i­ble: a wind-born toxin. Shya­malan sig­nals an oncom­ing attack with gusts of wind. Which is, of course, pre­pos­ter­ous because plants don’t cause wind (if my mem­ory of ele­men­tary school sci­ence is cor­rect, the wind starts from the motions of the tides). The char­ac­ters out­run­ning wind is about as pre­pos­ter­ous as the advanc­ing killer frost in Roland Emmerich’s envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter movie The Day After Tomorrow.

Zooey Deschanel and Marky Mark Wahlberg peek around the cor­ner for the next plot twist

The film’s envi­ron­men­tal issues first appear with a faint fla­vor of cre­ation­ism in an early scene set in Eliot’s class­room. He believes there are aspects of nature we may never truly under­stand, although sci­ence may slap an expla­na­tion on them in ret­ro­spect. But “just a the­ory” is the lan­guage of anti-intellectual cre­ation­ists who wish to dis­count evo­lu­tion. In Shyamalan’s hindu world­view, does an act of nature equal an act of god? Is the earth being mali­cious, defen­sive, or both? The planet may not be act­ing with con­scious intel­li­gence, but rather as a mere reac­tion to stim­uli; a kind of thin­ning of the herds.

As was the case with the 2003 black­out in the north­east, Shya­malan was cor­rect in observ­ing that everyone’s first the­ory in any post 9/11 calamity would be that it’s a ter­ror­ist attack. But it’s pretty much estab­lished very early that the cul­prits are the plants. This pretty much drains the sus­pense out of the pic­ture, and I actu­ally wished for one of Shyamalan’s patented twist end­ings. It does seem hugely wimpy com­pared the ruth­less and unspar­ing The Mist (read The Dork Report review). If Shya­malan had had the guts to go for a bleak end­ing like writer/director Frank Darabont’s Stephen King adap­ta­tion, The Hap­pen­ing might have been bet­ter received and per­haps remem­bered as one of his best.

Offi­cial movie site: www.thehappeningmovie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.