Religion OMG, Why Didn’t I Know About This Tuesday?!
posted by on June 13 at 16:39 PM
Apparently the new M. Night Shamalamayamamama movie The Happening is intelligent design propaganda. I totally skipped the Tuesday screening, because who cares about M. Night and it was going to have to be a web-only review, but I totally would not have been so derelict had I known anything whatsoever about the film’s content.
According to le Gawker:
M. Night Shyamalan’s critically-panned flick The Happening is Hollywood’s first blockbuster to promote the anti-evolutionary theory of intelligent design. Maybe you thought Ben Stein’s ill-fated documentary Expelled was the only movie to argue in favor of the neo-Christian idea that an “intelligent designer” created the universe. Think again. With its references to “unexplained acts of nature” and a science teacher main character who calls evolution “just a theory,” The Happening is basically a giant propaganda machine for intelligent design. Maybe science journalists are jizzing all over its allegedly realistic plants-attack-humans plot, but we talked to Shyamalan and we know the truth.Avowed Christian Shyamalan told us that The Happening is really about religious faith, and explained that he chose Mark Wahlberg to play science teacher Elliot Moore because of the actor’s intense belief in Jesus. Maybe he also chose vacant-eyed Zooey Deschanel to play his wife Alma because she looks like a little girl who needs a big strong monotheist in her life? No comment on that one from Shyamalan.
We get tipped off to the fact that this allegedly science fictional movie is really an ID tent revival in the opening scenes where Elliot teaches his science students about evolution. He explains to them that honeybees are disappearing all over the country, and asks what some possible explanations might be. Students who say things like “climate change” and “evolution” are dismissed as being “partly right.” But then when a generally quiet student finally says, “It’s an act of nature that we can’t understand,” Elliot lights up and says that’s the best answer. That phrase “act of nature,” which sounds suspiciously like “act of God,” crops up in the movie again and again[….]
It goes on (avec spoilers). The horror! I will see it this weekend and get back to y’all.
I retract my delight over your omission of this "film" from your film roundup, earlier on SLOG. Please do not buy a ticket to see The Happening, buy a ticket to something else and sneak in. I fervently want M. Knight's career to end; retroactively if possible.
I'm really surprised someone was willing to put up money so M. Night Shyamalamadingdong could prove once and for all just how much he sucks.
Please do go see it so I don't have to, unless it's really so bad that it's fun to watch.
As if I needed another reason to not see any movies by this guy.
See also: The X-Men, Heroes, and numerous other stories about "mutants" that proceed from the premise that every so often nature spontaneously decides to advance the process of evolution by causing individuals to be born who can turn invisible or shoot laser beams out of their eyes. If not Intelligent Design, at the very a least it bespeaks a highly Lamarckian take on the mechanisms of evolution.
@le gawker
Umm? "The Happening" has not been critically panned. I just read Manohla Dargis' & William Arnold's reviews in the NYT and P-I respectively. Both, gave positive reviews. I'm going to see the film.
@5, 20% on Rottentomatoes and dropping: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/10007985-happening/
What's funny is that two of the reviews I'm read mention the premise as being "Al Gore - like mushy-headed ecoterror"
Ach. Heard the director interviewed on NPR's Science Friday last week. Wanted to tear out my eyes. Further lost respect for Ira Flatow for letting M. Night S... spout off on all manner of bullshit without challenge. Ach.
Frankly, it's worse than intelligent design. It's antiscientific nonsense. At least intelligent design attempts to use logic to explain things. This movie seems to be telling us that everything is too complicated to understand so don't worry your little head about it.
I probably won't watch this unless it comes on my television while I happen to be sitting in front of it, but I wouldn't trust the damn Tomatometer as any greater barometer of a film's worth than I would the WalMart Top DVD sales chart.
M. Night is massively overrated. Dude made one great movie, then spends the next 10 years making turds. It's disappointing to hear that he's a Discovery Institute guy, though. Hopefully Zooey Dewhatever just did this for the paycheck, because I don't want to hate her too.
I'm waiting for the synopsis to show up on moviespoiler.com.
Over at the IMdb Mark Walberg says that making the movie has ruined his life.
10: How can he be overrated when 90 percent of people hate his films? I mean, the only people overrating him are the studios, the advertisers and the man himself. Everyone I knows thinks he's a piece of shit director and has been since at least "Unbreakable."
No one should be surprised. "Signs" was also inarticulate pseudo-religious nonsense.
"Unbreakable" fucking rocked, though.
That's interesting, whateveryournameis Amy Warner or something vanilla like that, but why did Josh Feit get fired?
Josh was fired????????????
WHy do you hate Chelsea so much????
God, Wahlberg, Deschanel and Leguizamo? I really don't want to hate them. I hope they got paid well.
I thought MNS was Hindu. I can't find anywhere he's avowed that he's a Christian.
Still, Hindu ID would be just as useless as Christian ID.
I just read an interview with him at Scientific American. He didn't strike me as particularly pro-intelligent design. Is your source really credible?
Silly Mark Wahlberg character! Doesn't he know that honeybees are disappearing because of God-fearing giant hornets?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_DQYVppJG4
Movies are just that, movies. Entertainment.
I don't take most movies as truth even if they claim to be facts. When I was a kid a friend of mine saw "The Exorcist" and claimed he now believed in Jesus. I laughed like crazy and he changed his mind. Maybe it was just a movie after all.
Better to say, it's an act of nature we don't understand... yet.
Soooooooooo, are you trying to say that anything deemed paranormal is evidence of intelligent design?
Or that the paranormal doesn't exist?????
P.S. The source of the X-Men's mutations were originally in-vitro exposures to nuclear radiation. They were billed as "The Children of the Atom."
Slog is a-getting to be just like a Comic Book blog. Thanx Mr. Constant!
Err... I meant in utero... Instant karma for trying to use big words.
The paranormal doesn't exist.
Mark Wahlberg was much interesting when he was young and cute and barely clad, and no one cared what, or if, he thought about anything - including his thoughts on Jesus.
Maybe James Dean was smart to die when he did.....
@ 11. Link to IMDB comment please? Just trying to independently verify ...
@27: I searched for a good while before I finally found what @11 was referring to here:
http://www.imdb.com/news/ni0247040/
Says the director made him a nervous wreck.
Oh, @ 28. That's not nearly as relevant as I'd hoped.
You'd think that if they wanted to get the ID propaganda to the masses they wouldn't pick a director that sucked so bad. Didn't they see Lady in the Water?
Comments Closed
Comments are closed on this post.