BlackGeekdom Science-Fiction from a Different Perspective

I saw The Happening around the same time I saw The Incredible Hulk, but chose to not do a quick review at the time. Now that I’ve had time to process the movie, I feel like I have to say something about it. There is nothing wrong with a director doing a message movie. But to me, the mark of a good director and writer, which Shayamalan is both, is the ability to convey your message subtly. There are subjects that as a viewing public, in my opinion, that we can deal with being slapped in the face with. Those would be topics like racism, sexism, child abuse and rape. Environmentalism is a serious subject no doubt, but for the most part everyone cares about the environment. But to me, its one of those things that if you’re going to make a horror movie about, you’ve got to shock us or be more creative. There are hundreds maybe thousands of movies about the danger of our advancing technology. Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Philip K. Dick and Michael Critchton (I can’t believe I put him in the same sentence with those giants of science fiction) made careers out of warning us about how great and terrifying technology can be, but they didn’t sacrifice good story telling just to make their point. Simply having people drop dead from toxins released by plants is not going to cut it.

I just heard an interview with M. Night Shayamalan and he had the audacity to not only compare his movie and story in one breath to The Birds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Night of the Living Dead. He says the goal was to create a “B-Science fiction movie about a subject, where you have a great ride, you jump and you’re scared, crying and you do all those things as an audience member, and then at the end, the themes of the movie have you thinking of something a little deeper.”

The thing is that to me those movies dealt with those underlying issues in a more subtle way. (And honestly, I have no clue what the underlying theme of the Birds was) His movie was an in your face message movie. I don’t have a problem with that, but I do have a problem with him thinking that his film making is anywhere near the caliber of the other directors and writers of the movies that he mentioned. His movie is more like Spike Lee, a message. We can argue of the execution of getting his message across, but I have seen Hitchcock movies, and Shayamalan is no Hitchcock, despite what he thinks.

And unfortunately for him, if The Happening had been done by a first time director, many people would have been okay with it, but Shayamalan’s success means that we have come to expect better than average for him, and soon his credit from his early successes are going to run out, and he’s going to have a hard time getting anyone to come to his movies. Between Shayamalan and Tim Story (director of Fantastic Four and Rise of the Silver Surfer), minority directors are going to be told to stay away for Science Fiction.

I said before and I have told people not to waste time seeing it, but I think I’ve changed my mind.  I am not going to tell people not to see the movie, but just be aware when you go into it that there are no surprises, there is nothing being hidden from you, nothing to figure out, and there is nothing unexpected happening, no pun intended.

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