STUDIO: Fox
RELEASE DATE: October 7, 2008
STARRING: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, and Betty Buckley
WRITTEN BY: M. Night Shyamalan
DIRECTED BY: M. Night Shyamalan
FEATURES: Bonus View With Trivia Track
Deleted Scenes With Introduction By M. Night Shyamalan
Train Shooting Featurette
The Hard Cut Featurette
Forces Unseen Featurette
I Hear You Whispering Featurette
Visions Of The Happening: A Making Of
A Day For Night Featurette
Elements Of A Scene Featurette
Gag Reel
D-Box Motion Control
Digital Copy Of The Happening

What is happening to M. Night Shyamalan? The man who was so wildly acclaimed that he was dubbed "The Next Steven Spielberg" is waist deep in a career nightmare. The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs were critical and commercial darlings. The tide started to turn with The Village, but the supernatural sh*t really hit the fan with Lady in the Water, a film that was misguided for sure but still undeniably well-made. You felt like Shyamalan may be telling a bad story but that he was still a good storyteller in general. It was just the material - his screenplay - that was off the mark. I bring that up because that's what's truly remarkable about The Happening. It's easily my least favorite Shyamalan flick for one simple reason - for the first time, Shyamalan has lost his confidence. Lady in the Water almost felt like a middle finger to the critics who ridiculed The Village, but The Happening has a completely different feel to it. It's a nervous filmmaker trying to appease an audience with another end-of-the-world tale that he hasn't completely written yet. For the first time, Shyamalan's work feels desperate, an effort to please that not only fails to do so but feels nothing like his early films. Where is the storytelling of The Sixth Sense? The visual sensibility of Unbreakable? The almost Hitchcockian way he led his audience by the nose through the corn fields of Signs? It's ALL gone, replaced by hack work that feels more like a straight-to-video horror movie from someone you've never heard of.

The first act of The Happening almost works. (The problem is that Night only wrote one act and a twist, not realizing that he needed to do more than that.) In the opening, people around the world go still, silent, and then suddenly kill themselves with the closest instrument with which to do so. A woman stabs a hair chopstick into her jugular. Construction workers leap from the top of a building. A cop shoots himself in the head. What's going on? How can it be stopped? The fear that something completely unexplainable could strike at any moment is a thoroughly modern and relatable one. But before the film can get going, Shyamalan's tin ear for dialogue grinds it to a halt. Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, and John Leguizamo play a group of friends who try to escape the big city madness after they discover that the suicide rate seems to be higher in urban centers than natural ones. So, The Happening becomes a road movie, an escape from the unexplainable madness taking over big cities. Not a bad idea, but after a twist that has been revealed everywhere but I will still keep quiet, The Happening grinds to a dead stop. There's a moment in a field, where Wahlberg's character doesn't know where to go or what to do next and you can almost feel Shyamalan right there with him, unsure about the next step or how to come through with his set-up. So he doesn't. The final act of The Happening is the worst thing that Shyamalan has directed, by far. It's a mess and should only be seen by his most hardcore fans or people fascinated by how far he has fallen.

Now that the format war is over, Blu-Ray has really started to develop its own identity. Recent announcements like the development of BD-Live hint at the potential of the format and each studio has started to develop its own trademarks. Universal has "U-Control". Fox, the makers of The Happening, has BonusView, which allows a trivia track to play during the playback of the film. A commentary by Shyamalan, preferably one recorded after critics sharpened their knives on the film, would have been fascinating but he doesn't come through. Night is notoriously protective of his work and, despite his recent failing, is clearly a very smart man. Even people who didn't like The Happening would probably pay to hear him defend it. Instead, the Blu-Ray disc provides the standard making-of featurettes, deleted scenes, and a digital copy. None of what's provided is bad, but I wish there had been something a little more insightful into where The Happening derailed. Or, and this is probably true, if Night doesn't think it derailed, he should come forward and explain why. I still root for Shyamalan. There's simply too much talent on display in Sixth Sense, Signs, and Unbreakable to not think that he can come back and make a great film again. Let's all hope The Happening is his worst film. If he makes another one like this soon, he won't be around long enough to make another great one.