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18/6/2008
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The Happening (2008)
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M. Night Shyamalan is one of my favourite directors and so it pains me to say his latest film is not so good. The plot is pretty close to a Stephen King novel called Cell in which people lose control of themselves for seemingly no reason. This film presents the problem of people losing control and then causing themselves to commit suicide. My complaint is not that the film is gory (although it is) more that the story is rather loosely strung together. It does seem to be a little bit of a horror movie by numbers. This film could have been scored a lot lower, a number of the films around it I would see again sooner but there are a number of good things about this film.
First the characters work, the actors do a decent job of portraying the characters and you get a feeling of what it would be like if the event actually happened. I especially liked the relationship between Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel in the film and how they deal with having to look after their friends daughter. I also liked the horror and tension created when the virus was about to hit, this is done very well throughout the film. Never has the formula of what you don't see is the most scary the case though and this would have been true if some more of the gore were removed from it.
Overall this is the worst of Shyamalan's work so far but he has still managed to create a tense horror film that goes along relatively nicely. The dialogue and story are good but some of the set pieces needed more work and tend to be there for convenience as opposed to a real need for them. Decent job but could and should have been better.
Review by Jonathan Little
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