Moonage Webdream

In 1999 M. Night Shyamalan gave us the blockbuster hit, The Sixth Sense.  The climax of the movie is when the kid looks Bruce Willis squarely in the eyes and tells him he sees dead people.  Something clicked in me when I was watching that.  He sees dead people, he sees Bruce Willis, ergo, Bruce must be dead.  The movie dragged on for a while and low and behold, Bruce was dead the entire time.  I didn’t want to make everyone else on Earth feel stupid, so I said nothing at the time.  But, it just struck me that the crux of the plot was just WAY to obvious to be a professional suspense movie.  Everyone talked about it being a classic for a long time, people mimicked Haley’s dead people line.  And no one said a word how stupid Bruce’s character must have been not to even be concerned that a kid looking him squarely in the eye saw dead people.

Then he made a movie about a cute little mouse.  I hate cute little mice.

Then the next I heard about him, he had released a movie that seemed to be called “M. Night Shyamalan’s next movie”.  It was actually called Signs.  It was HUGE.  Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix teamed up to deliver the blockbuster hit about aliens traveling millions of light years that somehow couldn’t figure how to open doors, or more importantly, that the planet they decided to invade was made up almost exclusively of water.  Which, when applied by means of a glass, killed them instantly.  Breathing the water was OK.  It had something to do with the glass.  I never figured that part out.  Conveniently, Mel’s little kid left glasses of water in all kinds of convenient places one would need glasses of water to kill aliens.  I however, couldn’t get past the concept that these aliens were smart enough to build ships that traveled many times the speed of light, but they couldn’t open a wooden door, or more importantly, scan a planet for chemicals that would burn their flesh upon application from a glass.  As such, I thought this movie was even more stupid than the movie about the guy being told he was dead, but took another 30 minutes to figure it out.  And, more offensive than yet another movie about cute disease carrying rodents.

The next blockbuster was The Village.  A movie about a bunch of people more content to live in 19th century America than 21st.  So, they live a very rustic life totally isolated from civilization.  Wild concept huh?  In order to keep the peace, they create all these monsters that live in the woods surrounding the village.  The peace is shattered when one of them wants to leave.  So, the elders just tell her it’s all a joke and she leaves.  Movie over.

Oh, kay.

The next M. Night movie I totally missed and no one made me watch it.  It was probably his best.

Then came The Happening.  A movie that was panned by several critics as the worst movie ever made.  They are possibly right.  Waterworld was pretty amazing, but The Happening possibly tops it.  You start off by giving a bad actor with practically no range a role that has no range.  Stiff doesn’t even begin to describe Wahlberg.  Then, you toss disturbing scenes at random that are so disturbing and frequent that it becomes comical very quickly.  After a point, you find yourself enjoying the gore more than anything else in the movie.  The part where the guy happens to have an industrial shredder in his front yard with no safety switch, fires it up, lays down, and the thing runs over him perfectly is priceless.  Then, without any evidence whatsoever, the main character comes to the conclusion it ’s the WIND that’s causing the problem.  Plant enzymes are bad, the wind makes them worse.  We are very subtly told that plants create poisonous enzymes to protect themselves from predators.  So, fearing mankind’s destruction of the Earth, the plants kick into action.  However, if people move in small groups, the plants can’t find you.  So, they do that.  People keep doing themselves in anyway.

Plants don’t do that.  Anyone pretty well knows that.  Plant are perfectly content to go extinct.

The movie possibly hits it’s low when Wahlberg talks to an obviously plastic plant and informs us, “I’m talking to a plastic plant.”

At no point in the movie do you see a single person wearing an allergy mask or anything remotely similar.

I’m still inclined to think Waterworld is the worst ever made only because it’s so laughably bad.  The Happening isn’t laughable.  It’s stunning.  Someone gave M. Night Shyamalan a million bucks to make not one, but many stunningly bad movies.  Lots and lots of directors have made bad movies.  This guy seems to specialize in it.  After reeling several groaners, he’s already producing The Last Airbender and Devil.

I sorta doubt I’ll partake of those two.  I’m not even curious how bad they can be.