El Incidente / The Happening

I had some free time so I went to the flicks, not knowing what was on. I’ve seen the posters for El Incidente all over town last week so I picked that one. It’s another M Night Shyalaman affair. And it’s utterly daft. It starts in central park in New York and for some reason all the people in the park kill themselves. Not a drink-the-kool-aid kind of kill themselves but more a wooooo spoooky, look, they all stop walking and then they find gruesome ways to end it all. Okay, it’s an interesting start despite the flakey stop still, take two steps backwards pre suicide dance.

The first half of the film is like a live action itchy and scratchy cartoon only with suicides. The remainder is pokey fake science, led by Mark Walberg’s science teacher. He figures out what’s going on by erm, thinking reeeealllly hard, even though his mantra earlier on was observation, hypothesis, experiment, observation… which would have led to some fun scenes of him sending hapless bystanders into danger until he figured out why they died. Instead it came to him in a flash of inspiration and he and his rapidly dwindling band of survivors were saved.

It was an airborne thing, which for some reason is accompanied by a dangerous breeze… oooohhh so you can see it coming and run away (like the laughable ultra-cold in The Day After Tomorrow). Still, that wasn’t the worst thing about it. Even the ending wasn’t the worst thing, although it was pretty damn bad, the Incident just stops and the reason it happened is explained by a TV scientist a few months later as ‘one of those things in nature that we can’t explain’ WHAT! You couldn’t even come up with a better explanation than that? Don’t bother making the damn film until you can. That’s what writers are for. That’s as bad as, it’s all a dream.

The worst thing was the boom mic. Maybe I missed something in the dialogue, but in half the scenes the boom mic was hovering around clearly in view. At first I thought it was going to be some clever meta-film or something deliberate because, well it’s Mr shamalamadingdong and he does that sort of thing. Then as we got closer to the end I realised it was just plain rubbish film making. I wouldn’t be surprised to see in the credits Boom Operator (deceased) it was terrible. And who watched the dailies? Because they didn’t see it and it was soooooo obvious. It was even obvious to the ten teenagers who rather than watch the film, just talked all the way through it very loudly (that was the other thing I really didn’t like but I can’t blame MNS for that… or maybe I can, because if he had made a halfway gripping film they might have shut up).

By now I’ll have downloaded the Mark Kermode podcast from radio 5 and I’m hoping for some quality Kermodian rantage. If you haven’t hear’d any of his rants, the best are still available on the bbc website, and well worth listening to.