7. The Happening (2008)
It was a good movie on its own merits, made great by an ending that left audiences amazed, satisfied, and able to put together all of the previous clues they had missed in a classic “ah-ha” moment.
Unfortunately, very few of Shyamalan’s movies have even come close to replicating the success of “The Sixth Sense.”
“The Happening” is a movie about people killing themselves in horrific and gruesome ways. Audience members spend the movie wondering what might be causing the mass suicides.
Is it mind control? Is it infection? Is it aliens? Well, it turns out that plants, after co-existing with humans for hundreds of thousands of years, suddenly got mad that we were doing harm to the planet and decided to release massive amounts of hormone into the atmosphere that cause humans to kill themselves.
Never mind the fact that this concept flies in the face of everything we know about evolution (and plants for that matter). Forget about the fact that we have lived with plants for our entire existence and have never once been attacked by them en mass.
Forget all of that and consider only that the plot of the movie hinges on the idea that plants consciously decide to destroy humanity using mechanisms that no one was aware of and that they had never used before. It’s ludicrous. Everyone in the audience groaned when it became clear that they had just lost 91 minutes of their lives. They groaned again when they learned the film took in more than 163 million dollars.
