Posthuman Blues

I just endured M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening." I knew it was getting bad reviews, but what highly anticipated movie doesn't? Plus, I checked Roger Ebert's review and found it encouraging, if not exactly gushing. (I was particularly struck by the poignancy and subtlety cited by Ebert and purchased my ticket expecting a thoughtful new take on a shopworn, if dependable, theme.)

If only I'd trusted the bad reviews. For a movie ostensibly about the fragile balance of life on Earth, "The Happening" is conspicuously devoid of vitality. Shyamalan has crafted an ecological cautionary movie for people who've never seen an ecological cautionary movie -- and a worrisome self-portrait of a skilled film-maker who doesn't seem to realize he's on the verge of irrelevancy.

The characters in "The Happening" are mere sketches, static and uninteresting. The plot -- what there is of it -- is no more than an excuse for Shyamalan's characters to wander a dull New England countryside, where they're predictably picked off by their arboreal assailants.

Oh, there are some intriguing moments. Even a few brushes with the kind of quiet menace evidenced in "Signs." But they're fleeting and under-realized: gems left unexcavated for no real reason exept, one suspects, sheer laziness. For the most part we're left with a grind of a movie, as unarresting as it is unoriginal -- and capped by an ending so palpably condescending and unscary you'll want to take the movie's token graphic violence to heart and slit your wrists with the nearest possible sharp object.