The Happening/Wall Banger

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Wall Bangers from The Happening include:

  • In M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, this "happening" is caused by plants releasing an airborne chemical so they can protect themselves from humans. This leads to a handful of moments, including a scene in which the main characters try to outrun the wind.
  • The Power of Love was apparently able to stop the plants. (In the original script, this wasn't just subtext.)
  • For all the plants to attack at the same time, it would need to be an organized conspiracy, meaning that plants are sentient. Someone in the movie did say they can talk to each other. Oh, and the explanation given by the scientists in the movie?

"It's an act of nature, and we will never fully understand it."

    • MythBusters dealt with a theory similar to this. It's called Primary Perception, and it essentially states that all living things are sentient and have some sort of empathic and telepathic link to each other. But they did bust it.
  • Why would competing species of plants gang up to harm humans? That's like deer and wolves teaming up to attack people.
  • The plants' gases are evidently triggering a "suicide switch"—or rather, a "switch" that drives humans to commit suicide—within the human nervous system. No such switch exists. If it ever had, then Nature would have gotten rid of it long ago—Nature has had millions of years to develop things that trigger anything that drives one to self-annihilation.
  • The plants' sudden ability to release the toxin is explained this way: since they can't move to defend themselves, they evolved the ability to evolve spontaneously. This is like when Jet Jaguar reprogrammed himself to be able to grow enormous—but worse.
  • Why would plants stop at humans? Animals have also caused catastrophic environment damage. They could have taken out the feral rabbits of Australia.
  • Then there's the Family-Unfriendly Aesop this movie presents. Mother Nature starts brainwashing us into committing increasingly gruesome suicides, and we're the bad guys. Worst. Mother. Ever.
  • This is an environmentalist movie about the dangers of not caring for our planet, but every single human environment was unrealistically pristine. The protagonists flee from Nature through rolling green hills and breathtaking fields. Even in the big cities, everything is verdant and unrealistically clean. Does anybody remember seeing any trash on the street in either New York or Paris in this film? Emissions are the environment's biggest enemy, so why did they go to so much trouble portraying people rollerblading and biking everywhere? This is the cleanest environment in a movie about pollution ever made. Granted, the event begins near Central Park and Tuileries Garden, but you'd think they could show some smog or something to drive home why the planet suddenly turns mass-murderer.
  • The main characters realize that the plants are targeting large groups first. What's the next line, not even a minute later? "Stay in groups!" The plants don't need to remove their survival instincts; there's nothing to remove!

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