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The Happening and The Incredible HulkTwo summer blockbusters reviewed and a reader contest.

By Dana Stevens
Posted Friday, June 13, 2008, at 12:03 PM ET

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The Happening. Click image to expand.

The Happening (20th Century Fox) could be the title for every film M. Night Shyamalan has made. His movies are less like stories that you watch unfold than prefabricated experiences that happen to you. Some of them are pleasurable, like the wicked head game that was The Sixth Sense; some tedious, like the ponderous parlor trick of The Village. But you have to give the man this much due: He believes in his fun-house visions, as loony (Signs) or laughable (Lady in the Water) as they may be.

The Happening opens with a bang-up horror sequence worthy of George Romero or vintage David Cronenberg. One windy morning, Central Park is suddenly swept by a wave of suicides. Construction workers leap from rooftops in droves as pretty girls on benches find ways to off themselves with their hair accessories. Within hours, the plague of self-annihilation has spread to Philadelphia, where high-school science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) is grilling his students on the unexplained disappearance of honeybees. Soon it's Elliot who's on the endangered species list as he flees the wind-borne toxin (whose not-hard-to-guess origin shall remain unrevealed here) with his wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel), and their friend's child (Ashlyn Sanchez).

If Romero or Cronenberg were filming this story, they would enjoy earning the R rating that Shyamalan seems to be dutifully working toward with his ever-grosser suicide scenarios: A zookeeper politely offers his arms to a pair of lions for chomping! A man lies in front of a lawn mower and threshes himself to death! The dialogue is so stiff that it's hard to tell at what point a character has crossed over into must-kill-self zombiedom (this is particularly true of Deschanel, with her passive affect and gigantic Village of the Damned eyes). The whole solemn concoction is preposterous and not always in a fun way—even at 99 minutes' running time, the movie provides plenty of opportunities for watch-consultation in the dark. But there's also an efficiently maintained hum of low-level anxiety. The old-school horror tricks (the fake scare followed by a real one, the safe haven that isn't) feel more like cribbing than homage, but they get the job done. If you're a fan of Shyamalan's gimmicky endings, this movie's twist on the twist may surprise you. But here I shall draw the veil, out of respect for those who prefer to let The Happening just happen.

*************

The Incredible Hulk. Click image to expand.

Ang Lee's legendary misfire The Hulk (2003) is now just a blur of hazily recalled images: I recall a brooding Eric Bana, a weird Oedipal back story involving Nick Nolte, and some mutant poodles attacking Jennifer Connelly's car. Then again, The Incredible Hulk (Universal), a new film directed by Louis Leterrier, is also a hazy blur, and I saw it less than 48 hours ago. The hefty green corpse of Lee's movie has barely had time to molder in its grave, but Marvel Studios knows a potentially verdant franchise when it sees one, and so the Hulk has been resurrected—if not revitalized—in a new film that's neither a remake nor a sequel but a kind of Hulk 2.0.

This provenance puts The Incredible Hulk in an odd position, expectationswise. Have hopes been lowered by the chronological proximity of the prior Hulk or raised by its generally agreed-upon suckiness? Why remake a crappy movie five years later if it's only going to be marginally less crappy? The recent publicity over Ed Norton's rumored clashes with Marvel over the final cut, and his official statement to Entertainment Weekly assuring fans that the resulting movie was totally not going to blow, have only raised (or lowered!) expectations even further.

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Dana Stevens is Slate's movie critic.
Stills from: The Incredible Hulk © 2008 Universal Studios and Marvel Studios; The Happening by Zade Rosenthal © 2008 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved.
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Notes from the Fray Editor

This was a terrific Fray--articles connected to comic-books often bring out the best in readers. Baltimore Aureole's post title is helpfully self-explanatory, "10 Marvel superheroes I'd rather see in a movie than The Hulk," and the list is well worth a visit. There's an excellent thread on the Ang Lee Hulk movie here, (though there are comments on it everywhere) and even a defense of marzipan here...

Comments from the Fray

There is a certain Department of Defense training film quality to the film The Happening (a convention cleverly deployed by the film Cloverfield but not here). It has a matter-of-fact tone which suits such training films. But what is the lesson and for whom was it produced?

I'll guess that few people ever ponder the possibilities of any form of chemical attack, let alone one which is made upon humanity by Mother Nature herself. Chemical attacks involve the twin concepts of point sources and non-point sources. A big ugly pipe pumping purple poison out of a factory and into your river is a point source, easy enough to find and to fix. A simple example of a point source. A non-point source is, well, more diffuse. No one actually knows where it is exactly, it is just 'out there' somewhere.

The non-point source was what made The Happening so effective. Even films about terrorists who use chemical weapons have a point source, get the guy with the trigger and you stop the threat. The Happening is brilliant in that there is no guy with a trigger. To the extent that an 'event' is triggered at all it appears to be a function of human population density and not the decision of some terrorist with his/her finger on the trigger of some weapon in some definite location…

--wmccomninel

(To reply, click here)

What concerns or rather, what I fear might disappoint, is Marvel's complete control over all future productions. Don't get me wrong- it was beyond travesty that just about everyone was cashing in on this California comic gold rush except the very people that created these characters i.e. Stan Lee or Jack Kirby. But I worry that…bubble gum, family friendly, fun-but-slightly shallow movies will continue to be the standard in the Marvel Universe…

I was fascinated with these comic book heroes as a kid and even though I have left them behind, I've always defended them for their allegorical and symbolic undertones while thoroughly enjoying the action playing out onscreen as an adult. I know that Marvel wants to enlist an entirely new generation of kids to the their universe but they have to grow up one day too. The reason why people like me are guaranteed tickets is not to keep our reps up on some comicon blog but to leave the theater feeling vindicated for retaining our fondness for these comics as adults.

--SatoriThroughAllegory

(To reply, click here)

(6/15)

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