The Happening (2008)

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Movie
German title The happening
Original title The happening
Country of production USA , India , France
original language English
Publishing year 2008
length 91 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
JMK 14
Rod
Director M. Night Shyamalan
script M. Night Shyamalan
production Barry Mendel ,
Sam Mercer ,
M. Night Shyamalan
music James Newton Howard
camera Tak Fujimoto
cut Conrad Buff IV
occupation

The Happening [ də Haep (ə) nɪŋ ] ( German: the occurrence that happening ) is an American mystery - thriller from the year 2008 . Directed by M. Night Shyamalan , who also wrote the script and acted as producer. Shyamalan himself called The Happening a B-Movie . The subject of the film is a mysterious nerve poison , presumably released by plants , which, transmitted by the wind, affects people in such a way that they commit suicide.

Shyamalan's work met with mostly negative criticism on the occasion of its premiere, but nevertheless developed into a financial success.

action

On the northeast coast of the United States, unsolved cases of suicides are increasing in large cities . A girl is sitting on a park bench in New York and suddenly stabs herself with a hairpin . There are tons of construction workers throwing themselves off a building that they are renovating.

Elliot Moore, who is married to Alma, works as a biology teacher in Philadelphia . He is friends with his colleague Julian. Moore is discussing with his students the unexplained disappearance of bees in the United States when he and his colleagues hear the news of the suicides in New York. The authorities initially assume a terrorist attack with poison gas . School lessons are discontinued.

Elliot later comes to the conclusion that plants release a neurotoxin that acts in three stages in humans: in the first stage the victim suffers linguistic confusion, in the next stage disorientation occurs and in the last stage the victim commits suicide.

The Moores, Julian and his daughter Jess flee by train to the country; however, the train stops en route because the driver no longer has radio contact with the outside world. Julian goes to Princeton, New Jersey to get his wife. He leaves his daughter behind with his friends. When the car in which he is riding reaches an inhabited area, they discover that the apparition has already occurred here. They notice too late that outside air is entering through a hole in the roof of the car, whereupon the occupants, including Julian, kill themselves.

Elliot, Alma and Jess escape in a car with a couple of gardeners. People are aiming for a border in the west beyond which no incidents have occurred. You meet more refugees. This large group moves on on foot, having concluded that there are increasing numbers of streets being "attacked". Due to different assumptions about the epidemic, they split up into smaller groups until only the Moores and Jess stay together. Elliot speculates that the incidents depend on the size of the group of people, so they avoid crowds from now on. They find a place to sleep on the farm of Mrs. Jones, who has gone mad in her self-chosen isolation. When the farm is also ravaged the next morning, Mrs. Jones kills herself, which makes it clear that even individuals are no longer safe. However, Elliot, his wife and Jess find shelter inside the farm and survive the disaster.

Three months later, things are back to normal. Elliot and Alma have taken in Jess as their daughter, and Alma is also expecting a child of her own. A biologist can be heard on television speculating that the event was a warning, a defensive reaction on the part of the planet in response to overpopulation and environmental damage.

In the final scene you can see how the events from the opening scene in Central Park are repeated in Paris, in the Jardin des Tuileries of the Louvre Royal Palace .

Emergence

Shyamalan first wrote a screenplay called The Green Effect about a struggle of nature against humans. However, after the failure of The Girl in the Water , Shyamalan was no longer considered a "safe bet" and it was more difficult for him to find a studio that would support his new project. 20th Century Fox finally agreed to fund the film on the condition that the script be rewritten a bit, the title changed, and half of the production funded by another studio. Shyamalan rewrote the script, changed the title to The Happening, and found Indian media group UTV to cover half the cost. Allison Hope Weiner wrote in the New York Times on June 2, 2008 that the failure of The Girl Out of the Water at the box office and critics put pressure on Shyamalan. If The Happening fails , he could run into trouble keeping full control of his projects.

Filming began on August 6, 2007. The film was filmed in Philadelphia and in a few other locations in Pennsylvania , New York City and Paris . In November 2007 the last stone fell.

Themes and staging

Shyamalan did not direct The Happening like usual disaster films ( The Day After Tomorrow or Twister ). He renounces this usual point of view, in which it is mostly “distortions or exotic expressions that turn into a spectacle in terms of form and extent”, but replaces it with brutal suicides. This makes the film the opposite of normal disaster films. The deadly phenomenon cannot be perceived (the nerve poison) and nature, which normally falls victim to and symbol of the destruction of life under water masses, meteor impacts or ice and lava, becomes the real danger - but its beauty remains intact. While in The Thin Red Line by Terrence Malick the bloody war was contrasted with the natural beauty, in The Happening the rustling leaves or the wind with “outrageous poetry” are deadly. The film scholar Bernd Zywietz therefore interprets the film as a kind of "counter-apocalypse".

In order to preserve the idyll that emanates from the light and poetic wind blowing through the grasses and trees, the suicidal people do not become “like in current zombie films into tearing beasts that tear each other apart”. In an eerie silence they turn their vehicles, pins, weapons, so to speak, the product of their own culture against themselves and thus against their existence.

As with Signs , Shyamalan uses the media, especially radio and television, to convey worldly explanations and information. Suicides are depicted on cell phones: it is not the real suicide that triggers the horror, but its depiction.

reception

source rating
Rotten tomatoes
critic
audience
Metacritic
critic
audience
IMDb

Publication and contemporary reviews

The widespread theatrical release began in Belgium , France and some other countries on June 11, 2008. The German theatrical release - in a version shortened by about one minute - followed on June 12, 2008; the US on June 13, 2008. In the US, the critics of Shyamalan's work were not very enthusiastic (17% of the collected reviews of Rotten Tomatoes were positive).

Justin Chang of Variety wrote that the film was "a fluctuating, uninspired eco-thriller." Shyamalan tries to show the breakdown of a family, but one does not have the feeling that the "brave" acting Wahlberg and Deschanel would fit together. James Berardinelli gave the film one and a half stars out of four and also found the thriller boring. Roger Ebert , however, said in the Chicago Sun-Times of June 12, 2008, the film was "strangely touching". The critic acknowledges the "calm, realistic way" in which Shyamalan tells the story of the possible end of humanity. This way is more efficient than if there was more action.

Advertising poster for The Happening at the Festival de Cannes ( 2008 )

In Germany, the criticisms were similar to those in the USA. Georg Seeßlen , a renowned German film critic, was of the opinion that Shyamalan was ruining the gruesome poetry of the first suicide scenes by allowing such artistic-abstract depictions to be followed by other suicide scenes, such as the self-sacrifice in a lion cage or the car liquidation by a lawnmower, which the border with Ed Wood memory segment of cinematographic fantasy more than touch. In addition, the director could not decide whether he wanted to shoot a "cynical-satirical splatter movie [...], an ironic homage to doomsday films or a grimly moral eco-EC comic variant". Andreas Borcholte ( Spiegel Online ) described the film as a "cinema disaster" with a "terrifyingly thin plot", "bad actors and pathetic dialogues". Peter Körte said in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of June 12, 2008 that one should not find the film described as an "intimate nightmare" convincing. Heiko Rosner from the film magazine Cinema was not in the least impressed by the film: “Shyamalan presents his Fleurop apocalypse with holy earnestness, without apparently ever being aware of the grotesque banality of his eco-oath. The only comment on this cracking nothing about film: May M. Night Shyamalan come to his senses again. "

On the other hand, Jens Hinrichsen's opinion ( Film Service ) was that The Happening was staged without frills and at high speed, at times almost documentary . The film oriented at the birds of Alfred Hitchcock without the classic imitate, however cheap. The thriller is the most terrifying and at the same time the most subtle contribution to Hollywood's current fashion topic of ecology. Doris Kuhn wrote on the website of the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the film was more than just “average entertainment cinema”. Shyamalan demands of his viewers "turning away from the rational" and the shown longings for death are scenes of "creepy intensity". The director is a “fanatic of love” because he “seeks to overcome evil in a devotion to feeling”. This would “stick” longer than his “traditional closing punch”. Anke Sterneborg, also from the Süddeutsche Zeitung , judged that Shyamalan knows how to create tension and horror with minimal, but very cinematic means (wind blows).

In spring 2009 The Happening was "nominated" for the Golden Raspberry for the worst film. Shyamalan also got two other nominations for worst screenwriter and director. Furthermore, Mark Wahlberg was suggested as the worst actor.

revenue

On the opening weekend, The Happening grossed more than 30 million US dollars in the USA, while 195,000 visitors were counted in Germany in the first week. By October 16, 2008, the film had grossed around 163.3 million US dollars worldwide, including around 64.5 million US dollars in cinemas in the USA, 4.5 million US dollars in Germany and 11.3 million US dollars in Japan. Measured against the film's budget, which was estimated at $ 48 million, the film was a financial success despite mostly negative reviews.

The DVD revenues according in North America amounted to an additional 28 million US dollars.

Film music

The film's soundtrack was created by James Newton Howard and recorded by the Hollywood Studio Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Pete Anthony.

No. title length
1. The Happening - Main Titles 02:28
2. Evacuating Philadelphia 02:21
3. Vice Principal 01:56
4th Central Park 02:58
5. We Lost Contact 00:59
6th You Can T Just Leave Us Here 01:43
7th Rittenhouse Square 01:59
8th. Five Miles Back Princeton 01:13
9. Jess Comforts Elliot 02:31
10. My Firearm Is My Friend 02:59
11. Abandoned House 01:32
12. Shotgun 04:27
13. You Eyin My Lemon Drink? 04:28
14th Mrs. Jones 01:44
15th Voices 01:36
16. Be with you 03:41
17th The Happening - End Title Suite 08:36

literature

Background information and film analysis

  • Bernd Zywietz: Seeing dead people: M. Night Shyamalan and his films , Edition Screenshot Volume 1, Mainz 2008, ISBN 978-3-00-025297-6

Review mirror

  • epd film : No. 7/2008 p. 37 criticism by Georg Seeßlen ( negative )
  • Cinema : No. 362 7/2008 p. 57 Critique by Heiko Rosner ( negative )
  • Film-Dienst : No. 13/2008 p. 38 Criticism by Jens Hinrichsen ( positive )
  • Süddeutsche Zeitung : No. 135 (June 12, 2008), p. 5 (SZ-Extra) criticism by Anke Sternborg ( positive )
  • Cahiers du Cinéma : No. 635 (June 2008) pp. 32–35 Criticism by Emmanuel Burdeau ( average to negative )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for The Happening . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , May 2008 (PDF; test number: 114 085 K).
  2. ↑ Age rating for The Happening . Youth Media Commission .
  3. ↑ Doug Ganley: Shyamalan calls 'The Happening' the best B movie ever. In: CNN . Retrieved September 9, 2015 .
  4. ↑ Shyamalan re-working 'Green' by Michael Fleming in Variety on January 28, 2007, accessed June 5, 2008
  5. ↑ Michael Fleming: Fox lands Shyamalan movie. In: Variety . Retrieved February 20, 2009 .
  6. ↑ Cinema No. 361 (June 2008), page 57 ff.
  7. ^ Review by Allison Hope Weiner , nytimes.com, accessed June 5, 2008
  8. ^ Filming locations for The Happening. In: Internet Movie Database . Retrieved February 20, 2009 .
  9. ^ Box office / Business for The Happening. In: Internet Movie Database . Retrieved November 12, 2012 .
  10. ↑ a b Zywietz: Seeing dead people . P. 147
  11. ↑ Zywietz: Seeing dead people . P. 147f
  12. ↑ a b film review by Doris Kuhn , sueddeutsche.de, accessed on October 16, 2008
  13. ↑ a b Zywietz: Seeing dead people . P. 148
  14. ↑ Zywietz: Seeing dead people . P. 144
  15. ↑ Marco Kreuzer: The dramaturgy of the uncanny in M. Night Shyamalan . P. 59 - ISBN 978-3-639-05921-2
  16. ↑ a b c The Happening (2008). In: Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved July 14, 2013 .
  17. ↑ a b The Happening at Metacritic , accessed July 14, 2013
  18. ^ The Happening. In: Internet Movie Database . Retrieved July 14, 2013 .
  19. ↑ schnittberichte.com , accessed on June 16, 2008
  20. ↑ Release dates for The Happening , accessed June 5, 2008
  21. ↑ Justin Chang: The Happening. In: Variety. Retrieved March 28, 2009 .
  22. ↑ James Berardinelli: The Happening. In: reelviews.net. Retrieved March 28, 2009 .
  23. ^ Roger Ebert: The Happening. In: rogerebert.com. Retrieved March 28, 2009 .
  24. ↑ Seeßlen, Georg: The Happening . In: epd Film 7/2008 p. 37
  25. ↑ Andreas Borcholte: Good night, Shyamalan. In: Spiegel Online. Retrieved March 28, 2009 .
  26. ^ Review by Peter Körte , accessed June 12, 2008
  27. ↑ Rosner, Heiko: The Happening . In: Cinema 7/2008 (No. 362) p. 57
  28. ↑ Hinrichsen, Jens: The Happening . In: Film-Dienst 13/2008 p. 38
  29. ↑ Sterneborg, Anke: The tree, my friend and executioner. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung No. 135 (SZ Extra) p. 5
  30. ↑ Awards. In: Internet Movie Database. Retrieved March 28, 2009 .
  31. ↑ M. Night Shyamalan: The best starting weeks. In: Inside Kino. Retrieved March 29, 2009 .
  32. ↑ a b boxofficemojo.com , accessed November 4, 2008
  33. ↑ Box office results outside the US , accessed December 29, 2008
  34. ^ The Happening (2008) - Video Sales. In: The Numbers. Retrieved September 27, 2015 .