The new picture from M. Night Shyamalan opened yesterday (Friday the 13th....scary!).Mark Wahlberg plays a Philly science teacher, Zooey Deschanel plays his wife and John Leguizamo is a math teacher. The three of them get caught up in a bizarre situation that has people all across the North East committing suicide. In an attempt to flee the danger, they head to rural Pennsylvania and meet up with other individuals that are trying to understand the phenomena.
The story is quite simply, man vs. nature, but taken to an extreme. No one seems to understand how or why the plants and trees are allowing people to kill themselves.
One thing's for sure, the story/premise itself is pretty good. However, it's all downhill from there. The script is absolutely ridiculous. The characters are poorly sketched, with no real objectives, or desires. There are so many red herrings, like the wife's supposed philandering, the math teacher's wife, a crazy old lady, all with no real weight to the story.
Worst of all is the directing. The performances that Shyamalan gets from his actors are so odd and inconsistent. The choices he's made in the editing room leave me wondering about his original idea for this picture. Was it supposed to be a tribute to 1950's horror/sci-fi? A tongue-in-cheek satire? Or a straight-faced attempt to scare us? Depending on the scene, you could say it's one of these, but at the end of the day, it's none of them. What it really is though, is a complete waste of time.
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