So, is The Happening as bad as the buzz would have you believe? No, it's worse. SO much worse. In fact, M. Night should wear it as badge of honor that, in a year that witnessed two theatrical releases by Uwe Boll, The Happening will probably still claim the top spot on most year-end "Worst Movies of 2008" lists. The Happening is a hard movie to talk about - so much of the film's ridiculousness revolves around its premise, which I don't want to spoil. But its shrouded-in-secret premise isn't the real problem with The Happening. As you've seen the trailers, the set-up involves a strange airborne macguffin that causes people to become disoriented and eventually kill themselves, often in the most gruesome ways possible.

The "attacks" begin early one morning in Central Park, and we follow wide-eyed high school science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), his best friend Julian (John Leguizamo) and Julian's daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) as they board a train to wait out the aftermath - of what they assume is a terrorist attack - at Julian's mother's house in Philadelphia. But the strange outbreaks of suicides start sweeping across the Northeast, causing Elliot's train to abandon its passengers in the middle of rural Pennsylvania, which, as it just happens, is the center of the epidemic. Thus it's up to Elliot to figure out what's causing the "Happening," not to stop it, but just so he'll be able to survive and hopefully resurrect his floundering marriage to the emotionally distant Alma.

That's a pretty vague plot summary, but there's not much of a plot to The Happening. The movie is, at its heart, a simple story about people trying to survive an ecological disaster that goes beyond the limits of human understanding. Much like Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, The Happening never goes into too much detail in explaining why things are unfolding or exactly how the epidemic began, but rather it hopes that the drama of watching ordinary people fighting against the impossible is compelling enough to make audiences suspend their disbelief. And, in other hands, I really do believe that the silly set-up behind The Happening could've worked and worked well.

The problem, the fatal problem, with The Happening is Shyamalan's execution of said premise. Where do you begin with a movie in which not a single character acts in a believable or even rational fashion? Where do you begin with a movie in which not one single line of dialogue sounds genuine or unscripted? Where do you begin with a movie where almost every scene is filled with obvious, ham-fisted imagery like a giant billboard that reads "You deserve this!" visible as our protagonists run through a country field, trying to escape an oncoming invisible predator? How can you take a movie like that seriously? The simple answer is - you can't.

Things get especially galling when Shyamalan starts dusting off plot devices from his past movies - most notably, Signs - and tries to recycle them as new. There's the strange character who is somehow able to theorize EXACTLY why the "Happening" is occurring, without any evidence to support his theory, just like the doctor who just knew to get by the water in Signs. We even get a reprise of the fantastically scary alien home video footage in Signs, but this time, it's re-imagined as an impossibly crisp viral iPhone video of a man getting mauled in a lion cage, which, it needs to be said, looks so ridiculously fake that it looks like something from the Onion News Network. Shyamalan's biggest mistake is that he never, ever grounds the film in anything that even comes close to feeling real and, as such, there's not a single moment of drama in the entire movie.

I never once believed that any of the choices made by any of the characters came from a real or organic place (there's a choice that Leguizamo's Julian makes early on that's particularly heinous), so when people start dying, it's almost impossible to care. And, when the film is over, and you see how stupidly the characters themselves react to aftermath of the "Happening," it's clear that they didn't care about what happened either. Don't believe anyone who tries to compare The Happening to tension-filled classics like The Birds or Day of the Triffids, and definitely don't believe the hype about this being a hard-R ecological horror film. This is a stupid movie with a stupid premise populated with stupid characters who are as insubstantial as the "Happening" itself. M. Night isn't the underdog on this one. He's just the guy not doing his job very well.