Happening Trailer

A trailer for M. Night Shyamalan's upcoming apocalyptic film, The Happening, is up at Twitch Film. The trailer is a messy affair like all Hollywood trailers, cut the same fast, jumpy, flashy way. Hollywood trailers are getting really ridiculous.

I'm a huge Shyamalan fan, so I have no doubts that the film will be very watchable. Shyamalan's strength is that he never loses focus on story and character, as Todd Brown of Twitch Film says. Shyamalan creates incredibly believable characters and he directs his actors superbly. Even when his twists or fantastical elements are not that great, the emotional quotient and the characters of his film pull through, every single time.

Unlike most Hollywood directors today, Shyamalan has the ability and the courage to use old-fashion romance and drama. Whereas a lot of contemporary Hollywood directors just rely on flash and hipness. The thing I look forward to the most in his films are his big emotional moments, like the conversation between mother and son in the car in The Sixth Sense, or the porch scene in The Village.

But The Happening trailer, with its scenes of mass suicides and people jumping off buildings, reminds me of Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Kairo, another apocalyptic themed movie.

SlashFilm here points to the possible similarities between The Happening, Eli Roth's upcoming adaptation of Stephen King's Cell and The Signal. While Roth does gentlemanly admit that he's heard Shyamalan's film is different enough, but between Roth and Shyamalan, give me the latter's films any day.