First Impressions: 6 Films With Great Premises That Didn’t Deliver

5) The Happening

The Premise: Without any explanation, massive amounts of people are committing suicide. A family tries to escape this happening or figure it out before it gets to them.

The Failure: I was one of them. Watching the trailer (which you can see below), I knew M. Night Shyamalan was back! There was no way he could turn this masterpiece of a premise into Lady in the Water. Then, like millions of others, I groaned. Plants? Really? The thing with Shyamalan is that he has these great ideas, but fails to make them believable.  His command over “suspension of disbelief” is downright awful, which is a pivotal factor when making a sci-fi film. Because of this, his films end up being silly, breaking our focus, and bringing us to tears with laughter. He barely got away with it in Signs, but he couldn’t get away with it this time. Killer plants. Wow.

The Fix: The reason why killer plants is so ridiculous is because it’s such a cop-out. If self-aware plants is the way Shyamalan wanted to go, he should have found a way to seamlessly tie it in with the rest of the story by explaining how the plants became self-aware instead of people randomly running away from trees. Make it believable!