The Happening (2008)

I had never heard of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening. So when I saw a DVD of it at the East Hastings Street Sally Anne I googled the film and found its online presence consisted largely of articles stating why it isn't as bad as critics made it out to be when it was released in 2008, when everything, not just the American economy, was on a downturn. 

In a sentence, The Happening is the story of breeze-induced suicides that result from trees and shrubs ganging up on those responsible for ruining the planet; namely, human beings. These breezes begin at the site of all our woes -- New York City -- and stick to the northeastern U.S. seaboard, presumably because that's where the bulk of the carbon is coming from.

Leading us out of NYC is a very reasonable high school science teacher (Mark Wahlberg), his strange-by-contrast co-vivant (Zooey Deschanel), their equally strange friend (John Leguizamo) and his eleven-year-old daughter (Ashlyn Sanchez). Eventually the science teacher figures out the plants' strategy and reasons that we, as human beings, should modify our behaviour. The scene where the off-grid hermit crone who takes in the science teacher, his co-vivant and their friend's daughter succumbs to one of these breezes is left to the viewer to infer: that it was her angry selfishness that killed her. Thus, the key to survival is not simply lowering our carbon output, but taking it easy while doing so. Blah, blah, blah.

The screen grab up top comes after we cut from NYC to the breeze's second site of attack: Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Park. Rittenhouse? Rittenhouse? Where have I heard that name before? Ah, the kid with the legally-acquired assault rifle who drove from his home in Illinois to defend a used car lot in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The one who drifted from that too-quiet lot to go where the action was (a gas station), inciting through his armed presence a man with mental health issues, who this kid shot and killed, and when confronted for this killing, killed one more and wounded another -- all in the name of self-defence.  Blah, blah, blah.