M. Night Shyamalan is most definitely an auteur and this is the eighth film that he has written and directed. I was actually unaware of the first two films, Praying With Anger and Wide Awake and thought these might be short films, but they are actually full length features. However, it was definitely The Sixth Sense that got M. Night Shyamalan recognised by audiences. You would think that with this being film number eight they would get better, but instead they seem to get weirder. The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs were I think all very good. However, The Village, Lady In The Water and The Happening are all not so good.
The Village was very good right up until the end when the film just collapsed, it was as if M. Night Shyamalan had dug himself into a hole and didn't know how to get out of it and so ended up writing an absolutely crap ending. It would have worked much better if the monsters were real and I for one would have preferred the film being released many years later if only it meant that it had a good ending, because that is the last impression you leave the audience with and seems to be where a lot of films fail. The Village was one of those and so was The Happening.
Lady In The Water was just strange from the start and I have to say it takes a certain type of person to watch this film. Many people have said this film was too weird but I don't think that is the case. I think that it just has a smaller target audience because whilst it is a fairy tale it is not set in the past or in a fictional world but is set in the present and so perhaps makes it harder to become absorbed in the film because you are thinking, "Well that is just ridiculous." I bet no body thought that when they watched Pan's Labyrinth which everybody seemed to love, and I think the two films are very similar.
Now moving onto The Happening. The concept of this film was brilliant, but sadly the film wasn't so. It started out diving straight in at the deep end and didn't need no big introduction to life before the events. The first thing you see after the opening credits is an event. Now an event is when all the people in a certain area die because they committed suicide. The second event looked particularly amazing visually.
There are a great number of these events in the film and whilst I did not laugh at a single one, as the film progressed many people started to laugh at these events. And I could see why. They just got more ridiculous, less horrific and they just didn't look as good. Not only that but excluding one event there was hardly a single drop of blood, which could have made the later events scarier.
Mark Wahlberg plays the main character in this film, Elliot Moore. Now normally I wouldn't say Mark Wahlberg is a bad actor since he has done some very good performances in films such as Planet Of The Apes and The Italian Job, but I have to say that his acting was pretty poor in this film. Whether he had chosen to play his character in the way he did or M. Night Shyamalan had told him to play his character in the way he did, his character didn't set comfortably in this film. Now there were some parts of the film that were obviously meant to be funny, but there were also parts that really weren't supposed to be funny but the way Wahlberg played them you just couldn't help but see the funny side. He just seemed too happy throughout the whole film and didn't seem very scared at all. Apart from one scene where he was panicking and was very scared the rest of the time he just looked and sounded to happy. This really clashed with the music which was setting up these scary atmospheres all to be ruined by Mark Wahlberg's bad acting or M. Night Shyamalan's bad directing.
And then there is the story to consider. The moment the film started out with an event I thought, "That is a bit of a risk. How is he going to keep the film going strong?" But I quickly threw this thought out of my brain and gave the film a chance. Sadly I was right and the film slowly started losing it a bit. Such a shame when it started out so strong. However, if I look past the bad acting and the less horrific events then I could say the story kept strong for most of the film. Right up until the events just seemed to stop suddenly and we were taken to three months later. Everything seemed all better and Wahlberg's character Elliot and his wife seemed to be living happily together. Whilst the reason for the events was told to us on the news on the television screen.
Then it all starts again. Another event happens in another country and the credits start to roll. I felt awful at the end of this film because M. Night Shyamalan's name came up on screen and the music just kept on playing as if the film hadn't stopped, but unfortunately it had. It wasn't all the fault of the music but I just felt like I was walking out halfway through a film. To me the film had a very poor ending and like The Village it needed an alternate ending to replace from three months later to the credits.
The moral of the story is not unlike The Day After Tomorrow. Although sadly it does it in a much more blatent way which I found compromised the movie.
I don't usually say this but I would give this film a miss. Unless of course you are a die hard M. Night Shyamalan fan. But if you still want to see it and make up your own mind, I'd wait for the DVD and hopefully it might have some alternate endings.
