Until about an hour into this film, I hadn't really thought much of it or expected to write about it, but then something occurred to me so I had to. It is a very poorly rated film, infamously weak on a technical level, as are many of M. Night Shyamalan's works. But I think it may be misunderstood. It's not that I want to rush to it's defence, or that I think its an underappreciated masterpiece, but I do think there's a defence to be offered to those that (somewhat understandably) take it at face value and dismiss it as a mess. That is not to say it's actually good, but I believe the aim of the film isn't simply to be 'good' an the artistic sense. I believe it's purposefully and affectionately in the style of low budget early horror/disaster cinema.
It's difficult to fully articulate but it occurred to me that the acting style, dialogue and delivery, unintellegent/thoughtless characters, weak humour and overall feel (not to mention the concept itself) can easily be judged as poor filmmaking but I think it's more complex than that - I think it's an homage to early low budget explotiation films or creature features etc. I was thinking of films like War of the Worlds or Frankenstein vs the Wolfman as examples of the genres. If this is correct then there is purposefully little depth to the characters and characterization in the story. Acting wise, Wahlberg is actually a good choice for it - he is a remarkably unexpressive actor, which is what's required for this film. As such, it's actually a decent performance disguised as an awkward, frighteningly one-dimensional one. You can say the same about Zooey, although the camera only spends a fraction of the time focused on her compared to him.
I get the impression that M. Night is a student of early film and probably has a deeper understanding of such than 99% of the audience. I wonder if some of his other seemingly poor works deserve reassessing in a similar way (Lady in the Water, The Village) Of course all modern films owe a debt to early cinema, but in almost all cases, aspects of films and filmmaking, not least the style, has evolved drastically and become more realistic. This tries to recapture that early, now dated style of storytelling and acting, and on that front I think it actually works - It's just most people won't realise that is what's happening.
If anybody else had similar feelings about The Happening, I would love to hear from you.
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