By riffing off Hitchcock and Romero, Shyamalan creates certain expectations about the kind of threat his protagonists face and how they will fight it. Of course, Shyamalan lives to subvert expectations, but in order to do so successfully, he needs to create a work that at least nearly equals the ones he’s challenging. The expectations established by these films have, after all, seeped into our collective cinematic unconscious.
So does Shyamalan pull it off? The concept he’s dealing with has potential. In “nature gone wild,” the things we take most for granted are typically the things that turn against us. And what do we take more for granted than the air we breathe? (No matter the cause of the crisis, air is the common denominator here). The concept can work, but it will need strong characters to drive it and actors who will sell it.
Characters do drive The Birds and the Dead movies. The Birds starts with strong characters and develops them more fully through the crucible of an apocalyptic nightmare. In the Dead films, Romero cuts straight to character development through crisis. Unlike Hitchcock, he can’t pay for for A-list actors or a lengthy prelude, but he makes up for these deficiencies in the raw urgency and passion he gets from his cast. Audiences care when major characters go down in Romero films. Romero's actors, regardless of acting skill, always sell their situation.
In The Happening, though, Shyamalan sacrifices character to situation. Mark Wahlberg's is the only well-realized character among the major cast. A few small players – the soldier and horticulturist in particular – manage to make their characters resonate. But most of the cast has trouble getting the audience to care deeply about their characters' plight or even their deaths. Whether this is a function of the writing or the acting, it is ultimately the responsibility of the director.
Shyamalan loves to present himself with tricky problems that he tries to solve in unique ways. But instead of high concept that can be distilled into a single sentence (eg. “tell a ghost story from the perspective of a ghost who does not come across as a ghost”), The Happening gives us multiple concepts that get tangled up in each other: 1) “transform the 'nature gone wild' subgenre from animal/insect threats into vegetation/environmental threats while remaining equivocal that the threat even has its origin in nature,” 2) “transform the end result of the toxin so that the infected do not attack the uninfected but the infected attack themselves,” 3) “transform pestilence movies from scientists racing to find a cure to characters racing against the wind,” and so forth.
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