The Happening
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	M. Night Shyamalan
Produced by	Barry Mendel Sam Mercer M. Night Shyamalan
Written by	M. Night Shyamalan
Starring	Mark Wahlberg Zooey Deschanel John Leguizamo
Music by	James Newton Howard
Cinematography	Tak Fujimoto
Editing by	Conrad Buff
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	June 11, 2008: Belgium, France June 13, 2008: United States, United Kingdom, India
Running time	90 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	US $57 million
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

The Happening is a 2008 American apocalyptic film written, co-produced and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. It stars Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel. Production began in August 2007 in Philadelphia. In France and the French-speaking part of Belgium, it was released under the name Phénomènes (Phenomena) on June 11, 2008.

Plot

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The film revolves around a pandemic that begins in New York City, and quickly spreads across eastern United States. The pandemic is a toxin that has a devestating mental effect on humans: victims that breath in the toxin immediatly ceace what they are doing, have loss of speech and become physically disoriented. Finally, the victim unfreezes and commits suicide by the closest means possible: people jump from buildings, shoot or hang or cut themselves, throw themselves into barbed wire, drive vehicles off roads, and various other fatal means. The toxin is apparently spread by the wind.

The film opens in New York's Central Park, where the pandemic suddenly begins. People begin to commit suicide en masse. Three blocks away, construction workers are shown throwing themselves off buildings. The phenomena then appears in Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square, with a string of people all killing themselves with a police officer's gun.

The protagonist, science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) in Philadelphia, is in the middle of class when the principal interrupts and ends class early due to the reports of an apparent bioterrorist attack on New York. Elliot and his wife, Alma Moore (Zooey Deschanel), join Elliot's best friend and fellow teacher Julian (John Leguizamo) and his eight-year-old daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) as they decide to evacuate the city. The train they are taking soon stops at a small station in western Pennsylvania and train services are discontinued after the crew loses contact with "everyone." News begins to come through televisions and cell phones as the pandemic is shown spreading across the northeastern United States. The initial assumption of terrorism is abandoned as the scale and concentration begins to outpace the means of any terrorist group.

As people try to flee from the affected area , Julian joins a group heading to Princeton, trying to find his wife, who was last heard from on a bus heading there. He asks Elliot and Alma to take Jess along; they agree. Once Julian and the family reach Princeton, however, they find that the town has already been affected, many people hanging from trees. Julian notices a tear in the car's sunroof, only for the affected driver to suddenly crash the vehicle into a tree. Though Julian survives the crash, he shortly succumbs and slashes his wrists with pieces from the broken windshield.

As Elliot, Alma, and Jess get a ride with a husband and his wife, the man explains his theory that plants are attacking people as a defense mechanism. Multiple cars meet at a crossroads, with each fleeing from another affected direction. A soldier, Pvt. Auster, takes charge, and advises a first group of people to immediately proceed on foot and a second follow. Elliot, Alma, and Jess accompany the smaller group. Soon, the toxin blows through the larger group, with Auster shooting himself and the others following in suit. Elliot, quickly assessing the situation as a two group experiment realizes that the phenomena might be an airborne neurotoxin, with the number of people present in an area needing to pass a certain threshold.^[1] and has the group split into three smaller ones.

Elliot, Alma, Jess, and two boys stay together, making their way towards an small enough community that they hope not to trigger a release of the toxin. The two boys are shot and killed by a group of paranoid individuals holed in a house when the group tries to enter to get some food. Elliot, Alma, and Jess then come across the house of an elderly woman, who seemingly lives in complete isolation and is ignorant of the pandemic. Though she allows them to stay, she proves to be increasingly paranoid and harsh to the point that she demands that they must leave when Elliot enters a room and he is falsely accused of stealing.

However, the sensitivity of plants seems affected, as now even individuals are shown to trigger the neurotoxin, as the old woman kills herself shortly after arguing with Elliot. When they realize they have to stay inside, Elliot is in the house while Alma and Jess are in the barn, with only a speaking tube to have a conversation through. With the prospect of no chance of survival, they prepare to die and go outside to meet and die together. The pandemic then suddenly subsides, however, and all three have survived. Three months later, Elliot and Alma have adjusted to a new life with Jess as their adopted daughter and Alma pregnant. However, echoing the concerns of some environmentalists in the film, that the pandemic may only have been just the first of a larger "war" by flora against the threat of humanity, a new outbreak is shown beginning in Paris.

Cast

• Mark Wahlberg as Elliot Moore, a high school science teacher from Philadelphia, who is married to Alma.
• Zooey Deschanel as Alma Moore, Elliot's estranged wife. We find out later in the movie that she lied to Elliot about working overtime to go out with another man.
• John Leguizamo as Julian, a high school math teacher and Elliot's friend.
• Ashlyn Sanchez as Jess, Julian's daughter.
• Spencer Breslin as Josh, a teenage boy who with his friend Jared temporarily travels with Elliot, Alma, and Jess.
• Betty Buckley as Mrs. Jones, a woman who lives in a isolated home somewhere in New Jersey.
• Jeremy Strong as Private Auster, a private in the US Army who fled from his station after finding all of the soldiers having killed themselves in the barbwire.
• Brian O'Halloran as "Jeep Driver".

Production

In January 2007 Shyamalan submitted a spec script entitled The Green Effect to various studios, but none expressed enough interest to purchase the script. The director collected ideas and notes from meetings, returning home to Philadelphia to rewrite the script, and 20th Century Fox greenlit the project.^[2] Now titled The Happening, the film was produced by Shyamalan and Barry Mendel and was the director's first R-rated project.^[3] Shyamalan compared the film to The Birds (1963) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).^[4]

Later in March, Wahlberg, with whom Shyamalan had been negotiating at the same time as his deal with Fox, was cast into the lead role of the $57 million project. Shyamalan had previously cast Wahlberg's brother Donnie in The Sixth Sense. The India-based company UTV will co-finance 50 percent of the film's budget and distribute the film in India, with Fox distributing in the rest of the territories. Production began in August in Philadelphia.^[5] The release date for The Happening was on June 13, 2008, intentionally set for Friday the 13th to suit the thriller.^[5]

Soundtrack

Main article: The Happening (soundtrack)

The score to The Happening was composed by Oscar-nominated composer James Newton Howard. He recorded his score with the Hollywood Studio Symphony at the Sony Scoring Stage with a 90-piece orchestra, and featured solos by cellist Maya Beiser.^[6] The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack for The Happening was released by Varese Sarabande Records on June 3, 2008.^[7]

Critical reaction

The Happening has received generally negative reviews from film critics.^[8] Rotten Tomatoes reported that 20% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based upon a sample of 115 reviews.^[9] At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 36, based on 34 reviews.^[8] The film received an average score of 45.6% from 55 film critics, according to Movie Tab.^[10]

Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter said the film lacked "cinematic intrigue and nail-biting tension" and that "the central menace ... does not pan out as any kind of Friday night entertainment.^[1] Variety 's Justin Chang thought the story "... covers territory already over-tilled by countless disaster epics and zombie movies, offering little in the way of suspense, visceral kicks or narrative vitality to warrant the retread."^[11] Mick LaSelle at San Francisco Chronicle felt the film was entertaining but not scary. He commented on Shyamalan's writing, saying "... instead of letting his idea breathe and develop and see where it might go, he jumps all over it and prematurely shapes it into a story."^[12] Time's Richard Corliss saw the film as "dispiriting indication that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has lost the touch" ^[13] Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips thought the film had workable premise, but found the characters "gasbags or forgetful"^[14] Joe Morgenstern of Wall Street Journal said the film was "woeful clunker of a paranoid thriller" and described it as "befuddling infelicities, insistent banalities, shambling pace and pervasive ineptitude". ^[15]

Roger Ebert, of Chicago Sun-Times, was the leading critic to praise the film. Giving the movie 3 out 4 stars, Ebert found it oddly touching and commented that "It is no doubt too thoughtful for the summer action season, but I appreciate the quietly realistic way Shyamalan finds to tell a story about the possible death of man"^[16] New York Times's Manohla Dargis praised Mark Wahlberg's lead performance and said " [the film] turns out to be a divertingly goofy thriller with an animistic bent, moments of shivery and twitchy suspense".^[17] Philipa Hawker of The Age gave it 3.5 out of 5 stars, commenting on "the mood of the film: a tantalising, sometimes frustrating parable about the menaces that human beings might face from unexpected quarters" and highlighted "sinister recurring moments is the sound of the breeze and the sight of it ruffling the trees or blowing across the grass - an image of tension that calls to mind Antonioni's Blowup."^[18]

Box office performance

On it's opening day (Friday the 13th) The Happening grossed $13 million. Over the weekend, the total gross came in at $30,517,109 in only 2,986 theaters in the United States and Canada, ranking #3 at the box office.^[19] Foreign box office gross for opening weekend was an estimated $32.1 million. ^[20] Total gross for the weekend is $62.6 million.

References

External links

• Official site
• The Happening at the Internet Movie Database
• The Happening at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Happening at Metacritic
• The Happening at Box Office Mojo
• The Happening at Allmovie
• Script Review of The Green Effect, 01/07/07 draft by LatinoReview.com