Because The Happening was bad. It was beyond bad. Based on thinking his last two movies were stinkers, I went in with low expectations but still some hope. As I've mentioned before, I know he can make a good film because I've seen and loved three of them. I set the bar very low; he didn't have to do much to clear. But The Happening is so awful it gives me hope that the proverbial room full of typing monkeys may actually produce the works of Shakespeare. Or at least something better than The Happening.
Night should steer clear of me if he ever sees me gardening.

How bad is The Happening? Let me count the ways . . .


1. The acting is terrible. Flat-out terrible. Wooden and stilted. These are good actors. I've seen the main cast (Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo) do very good work in a variety of roles. They are not bad actors. But their acting in this movie sounds like actors pretending to be bad actors. It's that bad. And, folks, when good actors produce bad acting in a movie, it's the director's fault.


2. There's not one single genuine emotional moment in the entire movie. It's just plain boring and silly. There's no momentum, no weight, no nothing.

3. It's funny. Very, very funny. But it's not meant to be. When the lion was ripping the dude's arms off, all I could think was, "It's just a flesh wound."
I laughed out loud many times during the movie, and so did others in the theater. Just an example: The cast is standing in front of the clear view of a house in the distance and Mark Wahlberg blurts out, "There's a house over there, c'mon let's go!"
To give you some perspective, imagine you and your significant other are walking to your car and you were to say, "Our car's right here! Let's go!"

4. By the time the characters were outrunning the wind (yes, you read that right), I began to wonder if The Happening was actually a comedy. It reminded me of the scene in the second Mummy movie when the heroes outrun the sunrise.

5. This may be the worst written movie I've seen in several years. He easily could have written this in a day. The dialogue is thoughtless and lame. And in many places it's very, very lazy. Characters say things nobody would ever say in such situations, but in this instance they are only saying them so that Shyamalan can move his characters from one place to another. That breaks the cardinal storytelling rule of "Show, don't tell," and in a movie breaking that rule is an even greater offense than in a book.
Sometimes the characters say things that come out of nowhere, that have nothing to do with the predicament they're in. It's like they have some mild Tourette's or something. Sometimes they say cliched, stupid things only a bad screenwriter would have characters say. Seriously, I wonder if this is a screenplay Night wrote in middle school.

6. Did I mention there are no genuine moments in the movie? These aren't real people. They are characters. And they're not smart ones or even authentic ones. (Taking the little girl out into the presumably deadly field at the end, for instance, struck me as asinine move for these characters. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.) Night's characters do things nobody would really do or really say. They serve the clumsy script, which is a sure sign of a thoughtless movie.

7. There is a moment in this film that is artistically irresponsible and morally reprehensible. And I'm going to spoil it: He kills off two junior high age boys. Vividly, gorily. These two boys are thrust into the story in the middle for no apparent reason other than to try to attach you to them so that Night can have their heads blown off by shotguns 15 minutes later. You know, to shock you. It was a stupid, downright mean scene. And at that point I think I realized Night hates his audience.

8. The ending is as lazy and unsatisfying in its revelation as it is hamhanded in its environmental propagandizing. I'll spoil that too: The twist is nobody knows really why it happened or why it stopped. But we better take care of the environment!

Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid.
This movie is not just bad. It is beyond bad. It is Ed Wood bad, only not entertainingly bad.
I want to set this movie on fire and pee on it.

My grade: F