MovieChat Forums > The Happening (2008) Discussion > Would this have been a good movie if all...

Would this have been a good movie if all the questions that were raised were answered?

posted 4 years ago by samoanjoes (58554)
6 replies | jump to latest

It seems the ambiguity was the biggest problem. It tricks us into thinking we're getting an answer.

[–] TheMan18 (13182) 4 years ago

Well, there have been PLENTY of movies (David Lynch et all) that supplied NO answer to their mystery whatsoever and left it to us to decipher, so this was not really that huge a problem for me. And I suppose maybe the virus in this movie really WAS mysterious and neither its characters nor audience were (yet) able to figure it out.

[–] samoanjoes (58554) 4 years ago

The virus was the entire premise so maybe that's why it bothered me more than the ambiguity of a Lynch film.

[–] thingmakersback (1443) 4 years ago

Struck me as not a lot different from Night of the Living Dead (1968)--In that case the only explanation floated is a '50s B-movie reference to "strange radiation" from the exploded Venus probe. There's something missing in The Happening and I don't know what it is, but the film still works pretty well for me.

[–] samoanjoes (58554) 4 years ago

But I don't feel like Night of the Living Dead was raising any questions. We knew they were zombies, but it didn't really matter what caused them to rise. It became about survival. With The Happening, they were raising questions and we weren't even sure how they were going to survive because we don't even know what they were trying to survive from.

[–] thingmakersback (1443) 4 years ago

I see your point but I usually like zombie films partly because of the mystery of what the "rules" are and if a cause is knowable. Rules: How is it transmitted? Are they actually dead or are they "infected"? How smart, fast etc.? Cause: A virus or something supernatural? So, I prefer films about the initial event rather than soap operas with horror like The Walking Dead. The Happening did seem to me like a zombie apocalypse film without the zombies... If the characters had seemed more compelling, I think that their confusion and jeopardy might have been enough to make it work without an explanation. So, the lack of any answer was not the thing that made it fail for me.

[–] moviechatterer (16308) 4 years ago

good point

With The Happening, they were raising questions and we weren't even sure how they were going to survive because we don't even know what they were trying to survive from.

Same with "The Road" they never say what happened to the Planet , so we have no idea if it will recover , and therefore what the point of anything the characters do is.