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Happening: Special Edition (The)
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Andreas Petersen (5th December 2008). |
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The Film
 I hope you, the reader, are ready to have your mind blown and most likely offended. Are you ready for it? Here it comes: I don’t think "The Happening" is a bad movie. Take a deep breath and let that sink in. Now, let me explain. It’s hard to remember a movie for universally hated than M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film in recent memory. Even he usually has a devout base that will defend his movies until the end of time, but for what ever reason, even these fans couldn’t get behind the director’s vision of a world where plants kill people with wind. I guess I should explain that I am a pretty hard core Shyamalan fan, and I honestly think he hasn’t made a bad movie since "Wide Awake" (1998), and that belief still stands with "The Happening." For those who are uninitiated, "The Happening" tells the story of Elliot (Mark Wahlberg), a middle-school science teacher, and his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), a couple who’s marriage is in trouble. All of their marital troubles inconveniently come to head on a particularly bad stretch of days. All of a sudden, people begin killing themselves in particularly gruesome fashions, and no one can figure out why. People cry terrorist, but it is eventually revealed (by some weird dude who really likes hot dogs), that the plants are tired of the habits of humanity, and are releasing spores through the wind that disrupt something in the brain that keeps people from jamming their hairpins into their necks. Ok, yes, the movie sounds silly when you explain it this way, but the plot is far from the chief complaints I have heard for this film. People will point primarily to the acting/writing, pointing out how cheesy it all is. However, I’m actually a huge fan the acting in this film. See, unlike most people, I felt like I got exactly what Shyamalan was going for with this film. He had been quoting as saying he wanted to make “the best B-movie ever made”, and that is exactly how I took this movie. Mark Wahlberg is capable of deep performances, as seen in "Boogie Nights" (1997) and "The Departed" (2006), but for the sake of this film, I enjoyed his semi-stupid overacted performance, in the context of this being a B-Sci-Fi movie. Not to sound like a person who is saying “WELL YOU JUST DON’T GET IT AND I DO”, because I can see why many would find the writing/acting annoying, but it just worked for me. Another thing I hear people talk down on this movie for is the lack of character depth. I will have to say, in terms of character development and inner struggle, "The Happening" isn’t pulling out any aces. However, this did not hinder my enjoyment of the movie. I feel as though the audience is offered characters visibly entirely on the surface, offering only what you see on the screen. Granted, for a film to be truly great, characters NEED to be developed, but when you have a movie about plants killing people, I personally threw this need out the window, even if this ultimately held the movie back from being something great, rather than just pretty good. Aside from these common complaints, I have a hard time seeing why people hate this movie as much as they do. I can see not loving it (which honestly I don’t), but I just don’t get it. I thought it had a great score, excellent camera work, strong supporting cast (specifically John Leguizamo as Julian, Elliot’s friend/co-worker), and not to mention some moments of great gnarly gore. Is this movie "Citizen Kane" (1941)? No, of course not. Hell, it’s not even as good as 50% of the bad sci-fi movies I love to watch. But I just don’t get why people act as though Shyamalan made a movie to insult their intelligence, when he obviously just wanted to make a glorified B-movie. That’s all I’m saying.
Video
"The Happening" is offered in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio high-definition 1080p 24/fps and mastered using AVC MPEG-4 compression, and apparently is supposed to look HD. Sadly though, I found this not to be the case. My biggest complaint is that there is a consistent grainy look to the film, something that surely wasn’t there during the movie’s theatrical run. When I watched the movie on my 1080p TV, I felt like I was watching either A) An old movie that had been sloppily transferred to Blu-Ray, or B) An up-converted DVD on my Blu-Ray player. Either way, I feel like a movie that was made this recently should have no excuse for looking this mediocre. Also, maybe I am just remembering the movie wrong, but many of the colors seem to feel much more low-key and muted than they were in theaters. Maybe I’m just glorifying my original theatrical experience, but to put it bluntly, I was very disappointed with the video quality on this disc.
Audio
This disc boasts an English DTS-HD Lossless Master Audio 5.1 track, as well has Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks in English, Spanish, and French, along with subtitles in English, Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean. Where the disc lacked in the video department, I was satisfied deeply with the HD audio track. Sound was an important aspect of the film to me, and it hasn’t been lost in the transition to my home theater system. All the music comes through beautifully, the dialogue clear, and during the infamous wind scene, I felt as though I was in the middle of a tornado. From what I checked out of the English 5.1 Dolby Digital track, it seemed suitable, but was nothing compared to the HD track, and I am convinced it is the way the movie was meant to be watched.
Extras
Fox has released this film with a series of featurettes, a gag reel, a series of deleted scenes, a trivia track, some bonus trailers and a digital copy of the film. below is a closer look at these supplements. DISC ONE: First up, this disc comes with a "Bonus View" trivia track. This acts as a semi-commentary, allowing you to watch the film with periodical picture-in-picture boxes popping up, ranging from scientific facts about the movie, to mini-interviews with cast and crew. While I’m a much bigger fan of strait commentaries, this was a welcome feature, allowing Shymalan to explain why me made certain choices, while also offering interesting facts about the shooting schedule of the film, special effect shots, among other things. Next is a featurette entitled "Train Shooting", running for 4 minutes and 15 seconds. I found this mini-making of perplexing, as it shows how the scenes involving trains were shot. What is so perplexing is that I never really thought those scenes were that interesting to begin with, let alone so interesting to warrant a whole featurette about them. Overall, I felt like this short extra was pointless. "The Hard Cut" featurette runs for 9 minutes and 2 seconds, explains the graphic nature of the film. The featurrete focuses specifically on a scene involving two young kids getting shot, while overlapping with Shyamalan and producers explaining why they went the direction they did. An interesting bit of information I learned from this is that it was not Shyamalan’s idea to shoot the movie for a hard-R, but rather the studios. "Forces Unseen" featurette runs for 4 minutes and 40 seconds, explores the motif of the invisible enemy in "The Happening", mainly focusing on the wind as a villain. While I personally didn’t have a problem with the wind being the monster of the film, most people found the idea laughable, and this featurette will only help to fuel their fires, and cast and crew seriously discuss how scary the wind is in the film. "I Hear You Whispering" featurette, runs for 4 minutes and 18 seconds, is an examination of the character Mrs. Jones (Betty Buckley), a scary old woman who Elliot and Alma encounter near the end of the film. Interview reveal that the goal of the whole Jones-arc was to produce something of a short film within the movie. The Mrs. Jones portion of the film always stuck out to me, and I found this featurette to be an interesting look at it. Also included is a gag reel, running for 2 minutes and 39 seconds. I’m never a huge fans of these reels, unless the people working on the project in question happen to be a group of funny people. I didn’t find that to be the case for "The Happening", as most of the gag reel footage is people just acting sort of wacky with equally wacky music playing in the background. The one shimmering moment in this feature is when Wahlberg dons a stupid person voice, and asks Shyamalan a question as though he were one of his critics. It seems to me that Wahlberg may have been the only person on set who was having a legitimately good time. Potentially the best feature included with "The Happening", the disc offers 4 delete scenes, each with an introduction by Shyamalan. They are: - "Elliot and Alma Fight", running for 4 minutes and 52 seconds, with a 1 minute and 14 second introduction from the director. This was the film’s original opening sequence, in which Elliot and Alma have a very passive fight, and talk about their troubles. Shyamalan explains that he felt like the scene reeked too much of exposition, but I wish it had remained in the film. I found it to be well written/acted, and I feel as though it may better explain why Elliot is the way he is. - "Lion Attack" (extended), running for 1 minute and 18 seconds, with a 45 second intro from the director, is an uncut clip of the scene in which a man feeds himself to some lions. I thought the extension of the scene was awesome, and it goes beyond arms getting ripped off, and into throats being bitten. - "Music Recital", running for 1 minute and 26 seconds, with a 55 second introduction from the director, is the only death cut entirely out of the film. The scene was originally supposed to play right after the lion attack, and showcases an incredibly silly death that I think would have made a better case for the film to be viewed as a B-movie. - "Survivalist Porch" (extended), running for 4 minutes and 11 seconds, with a 55 second intro from the director, is identical to scene in the film already, only this time a certain shot stays on a person as their head is blown off, instead of cutting away. "Visions of The Happening" featurette, runs for 11 minutes and 54 seconds, serves as the primary making-of for the disc. In this featurette, Shyamalan elaborates on his B-movie goals, and explains why he made Wahlberg’s character so lighthearted. Producers are also interviewed, offering their own takes on what they felt the movie was really about. The actor’s a also interviewed, and Wahlberg discusses where he got the ideas he implemented into his character (surprisingly, he claims he was just mimicking Shyamalan himself). "A Day for Night" featurette, runs for 6 minutes and 46 seconds, offers a look into one day of shooting on the set of "The Happening." In this featurette, I felt as though Syamalan weren’t acting, and for the first time, I got to see the man really work, and I found it interesting. This feature isn’t for laughs or wow-factor, but works well as a look at the raw footage of people making a movie. "Elements of a Scene" featurette, runs for 10 minutes and 3 seconds, is a featurette showing the work that went into one shot of the movie involving a car crash, and someone getting out of the car after, all in one shot. Pre-production mock ups are show, as well as editing techniques showcasing how the scene was cut together to appear as though it were indeed all one shot. Also included are some start-up bonus trailers, and they are: - "Digital Copy" promo running for 1 minute and 3 seconds. - "X-Files: I Want to Believe" running for 1 minute and 27 seconds. - "Babylon A.D." running for 1 minute and 53 seconds. - "Street Kings" running for 1 minute and 22 seconds. - "Behind Enemy Lines: Columbia" running for 49 seconds. DISC TWO: This edition also includes a digital copy of the film.
Overall
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