The happening - 2008

I kinda liked it. It’s not perfect, there aren’t characters I could commit emotionally, but it was interesting and well done. The main protagonists are Elliott and Alma, but their personal storyline was not interesting. Mark Wahlberg plays Elliott well enough as an ordinary science teacher who always tries to stay calm and think about things, and also someone who can accept the idea that there are things that we may never fully understand. This is shown right at the beginning while he teaches his class that honey bees are disappearing from the planet and we may never know why (if there are no dead bees around, therefore it’s not a case of something killing the bees, then it must be something preventing them from reproducing as they used to do, but of course I don’t know what). This is important to understand his reactions: he tries to keep cool in order to go on and safe himself and his family, and doesn’t give in to hysterics screaming ‘why oh why?’. Zooey Deschanel plays Alma, but I don’t like it at all how Alma was described, and specially how she was played. I can understand the idea, a girl who finds it difficult to show her emotions, who is very self-centered, and who will manage to grow and accept responsibilities as we see at the end where she’s able and willing to take care of the little girl and is happy when she becomes pregnant herself. Still, she’s depicted as someone who has trouble with commitment (although she did marry him), but she looks just so plain, so unemotional, all she does is looking at him with big big eyes, and that’s it. There is a good line when the little girl Jess is left with her, and the father tells Alma “don’t take my daughter’s hand unless you mean it”, and there’s a brief moment when Alma is hit by its meaning, but there isn’t much more in her throughout the movie. I think she was played the wrong way, or described the wrong way: she looked like somehow having trouble ‘feeling emotions’, not just showing them. Also, her development is kinda wrong, because she was still self-centered at the end of the happening, looking all smug when Elliott raised his hand in answer to the old woman’s question “who’s chasing who?”, and she focused on her dislike of the woman instead of looking at the big picture, and when remembering their first date she let go of Jess’ hand... 
The story: From the first scene we’re right into the heart of the story. Central Park in the morning, people walking, reading, talking, playing with their dogs, when all of a sudden most of them just freezes, they all stand motionless, some of them take a few steps backwards, but what they all do is, without any warning or explanation, simply kill themselves. The schools are closed, people are warned that there’s been a terrorist attack and they should evacuate. 
They meet Julian and Jess at the train station, and Alma gets offended because Elliott told him that they had a fight, so she sits alone on the train: this is to explain how much self-centered she is, offended that Julian said he was glad that she chose to come, and upset that a guy named Joey keeps calling her, instead of concentrate on the fact that people are dying and they are supposed to be running away because of terrorism..
Anyway, it soon becomes clear that the area involved is much wider than they thought and the terrorism idea is abandoned. People, on tv and around them, speculate that it could be a neurotoxin spread by plants and wind. 
People keep dying in the most strange ways, everywhere they just freeze and then look for a weapon of any kind to kill themselves: not just guns, but also beasts, glass, hair pins, height, cars, ropes, lawnmowers..
Their trains loses all contact so it stops at a small town. At a diner people see on tv that other cities have been affected too, but also that the area involved is only in the east coast, so they all try to drive away fast, to reach those parts unaffected by whatever is going on. Julian (John Leguiziano) has lost contact with his wife, so he asks some people going towards Princeton for a ride, in order to find her. He leaves Jess with them because he knows that where he’s going it’s very dangerous, but as they reach Princeton the start seeing bodies around. The car is not airtight and they are affected too. The driver launches the car against a tree, and we see Julian getting out of the car, sitting down and picking up a piece of glass that he’ll use to cut his wrists. 
Elliott, Alma and Jess are offered a ride by a couple who works with plants: the man is the first to formulate the theory that it might all be caused by plants, adapting quickly and releasing some kind of toxin to protect themselves.. They stop when they find bodies on the road: it means that the area has been affected, so they try looking for another road, but they see cars coming from all roads, saying they saw the same thing. All the survivors split into two groups and go on through the fields on foot. The larger group is affected too, so Elliott thinks that it’d be safer to split into even smaller groups, which leaves the three of them with only two teenage boys. They are not affected when the wind blows their way, so they keep going. They reach a model house where everything is plastic, so they try reaching other places in order to find some food. A house seems deserted until they see someone moving inside. The door and the windows are locked, and the man inside has no intention of letting them in, thinking that he ought to stay inside to be safe: when the two boys shout at him and kick the door, he shoots both of them with a rifle, because people are people and there will always someone willing to kill two innocent teenage boys if he thinks that maybe they might bring trouble. He didn’t even threaten them with the rifle first, no he went straight for the killing. 
Alma tells Elliott that they need to go on for the girl’s sake, and they reach a house that seems abandoned when seen from afar but it turns out that an old woman leaves there; Mrs Jones (Betty Buckley) is a weird, scary woman who has no contact whatsoever with the outside world and therefore knows nothing about what is going on, and has no intention of knowing. Without enthusiasm, they are offered a meal and a bed, but the next morning Elliott sees her going out into her vegetable garden where out of the blue she stops walking, takes a few step backwards, and then comes towards the house to repeatedly bang her head against the wall and the windows. 
He locks himself inside the house, scared that even individuals are targeted now, but Alma and Jess are not inside. They are in the shed outside, of course, because why else would the woman have told us that there is an old talking tube that connects it to the house, if not so that we now can see Elliott and Alma communicate with each other?..
We listen to them remembering their first date, and Alma leaves Jess alone to get near the tube, as if that meant being closer to Elliott... I didn’t like her leaving Jess alone: nothing could happen to Jess in there that she could prevent, but someone might say that an eight-year-old girl has more need for reassurance than an adult one :-/ plus, even though Jess was a smart girl, you never really know with children, and I would have felt safer being next to her, to make sure that she didn’t go outside. 
At some point, Elliott says crying that it’s not right like that, that if that’s the end he wants to die with her, so he steps outside and starts walking towards her. Alma and Jess do the same, walking towards him... Again, I don’t know, it might seem a romantic scene, with them walking towards each other, like a reuniting family, but I thought it was kind of irresponsible. I understand Elliott, he was risking his own life to be with her, when he does it it's romantic, but for Alma is different, she was risking the child’s life too, so when I saw that instead of romantic it felt irresponsible and selfish.
Any way, the wind comes and goes and they are unaffected. It only lasted a day.
We move forward three months, when the schools start reopening, and we see that they live all three together like a family, and Alma finds out she’s pregnant, and waits for Elliott all happy, and he’s happy too when she tells him. 
There is no clear explanation for what has happened, and of course people on tv keep talking about it. An expert says that his personal theory is that this was ‘a warning’ from Nature, but the show host thinks this is stupid because it only happened in one place... the last scene shows that it’s starting to happen in Paris too.
Personally I don't mind that there is no definite scientific explanation, it was an act of nature and these often take time to be understood. I was ok with that, I even liked it. 
As the opening credits say, it was “written produced and directed by M. Night Shyamalan”

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