No Fun

One of the great things (perhaps the only one) about the The Happening SPOILER WARNING is the number of hilarious reviews its spawned. Chris Orr’s, which isn’t even techincally a review, is one of the best. Well, his TNR colleague James Kirchick decided to spoil the fun by getting all huffy and puffy at M. Nigh Shyamalan for harboring misanthropic views. It seems like Jamie is taking the conceit a bit too seriously, it’s much more likely that the plot device is a vehicle for Shyamalan to include all sorts of bizarre deaths and to have a faux-deep meaning to the entire project. But really, is Shyamalan the first director to include a message that human’s are ultimatley responsible for what they do to the Earth? Ever see the Japanese Godzilla? And comparing Shyamalan to Al Gore is just over-the-top. But really, you to got to read it to believe it:

After 90 minutes of this, the culling of humanity ends. We catch a brief television news segment in which a scientist warns us that what the Northeast just experienced was akin to a terrestrial occurrence of oceanic “red tides.” The earth warned us, but thankfully we get another chance to amend the errors of our ways. Like the end of An Inconvenient Truth, we’re left with some hope that environmental catastrophe is not a foregone conclusion. Buy a plug-in car. Use public transportation when available. Turn off the light when you leave a room. An unoffensive, and indeed positive message. The second to last scene depicts the female lead waiting nervously in her bathroom to read the results of a home pregnancy test. To her delight, she is with child. Her husband comes home, they embrace. Humanity soldiers on. What a warm feeling after so many scenes of horrific death.

But Shyamalan is obsessed with conceits at the expense of every other aspect — the script, character development, and most importantly, good taste. He lives by the conceit, and, in this case, dies by it. After the pregnancy scene, the screen goes dark and we find ourselves in Paris, the Jardin des Tuileries to be exact. It’s eerily reminiscent of the film’s opening, with two men walking, engaged in pleasant conversation about their plans for the evening. A gust of wind! One of the men starts to stutter. People freeze. Screams. Mon Dieu!. Roll credits.

This isn’t just radical environemntalist fare; it’s perverse and anti-human. Shyamalan cuts immediately from the natural joy of pregnancy to its consequence: mass, nature-inflicted murder. It’s not carbon output, styrofoam cups or the clearing of the rain forests that so angers Mother Earth and, thus, her self-appointed human spokesman. It’s us.