"Nature unhinged" - June 13, 2008
M. Night Shyamalan’s new film, "The Happening" (movie site | IMDB ), opens this weekend: the reviewers are not being kind. It is apparently an ecological fable in which nature (the concept, not the journal) starts killing people – a bit like the lift in “De Lift”, but, you know, everywhere. Trees are reportedly the ringleaders. In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw breaks into his panning of the film (“abysmal acting, terrible direction, muddled script … decisively the wrong side of the laugh-with/laugh-at divide.”) to add extra demerits for its use of science.
Elliott superciliously drones that: "Science will come up with some reason to put in the books but in the end it'll just be a theory. We will fail to acknowledge that there are forces at work beyond our understanding." For this typically fatuous anti-rational, anti-scientific piece of smuggery, Shyamalan deserves a clip round the ear.
For those who want to pursue Shyamalan’s thinking on this, there’s a chat with him on Andy Revkin’s blog
I was thinking about how the highways was like a scar, and the fields and these trees were all bowing over the sides and I was thinking we’re outnumbered like millions to one. We’re depending on them putting out oxygen, to keep this atmosphere correct for us. And they are the ones keeping it correct for us. We depend on them and we’ve forgotten that.
Shyamalan is particularly disturbed by the bees – as is Le Monde.
Meanwhile, with the military thinking about various forms of human enhancement, one has to wonder why they haven’t just tried the winning gamma rays + anger formula demonstrated in The Hulk (movie site | IMDB )
Image: Happening poster
Comments
Was a excellent movie loads of entertainment and plenty of shocking moments.
Posted by: billy | June 18, 2008 08:05 AM