Pop Smart - The Happening: M. Night Shyamalan cant break out of his rut
The trailers for M. Night Shyamalans latest thriller give away the supernatural premise. Beginning in New Yorks Central Park, an unexplained phenomenon — what novelist Don DeLillo would call “an airborne toxic event” — causes innocent bystanders to commit suicide. Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel play a young married couple trying to stay ahead of the silent catastrophe as it strikes smaller towns and population centers.
A different kind of outbreak appears to have affected the characters in Shyamalans movies, who have become the equivalent of pod people. Shyamalans brilliant breakout film The Sixth Sense, with its warm, sympathetic interplay between Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment, increasingly seems like a fluke. Im a defender of his crop-circles film Signs, but even then, his dialogue became less natural, the performances more stilted. Success seems to have robbed Shyamalan of the human touch.