As I noted last week, M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening is an astonishingly bad movie. More astonishing still is that it was nearly a great deal worse. Vulture got its irreplaceable hands on an earlier draft of the screenplay, then titled "The Green Effect." Those who wish to avoid spoilers should avert their eyes; the rest can enjoy these pearls:
[I]n The Happening, the idea that malevolent plants can be defeated by true love is subtext. In The Green Effect, it's just … text. At script's climax, Mark Wahlberg's heroic science teacher realizes that the film's evil plants can't kill you with their suicide-causing neurotoxins if they think you're a good person (actual line of dialogue: "This is the final trigger, Alma! They're weeding out our energy! They've become a mood ring. When they see a color they don't like, it sets them off"). In Shyamalan's original vision, the plants kill mean old religious fanatics, but they spare Marky Mark because he and his unfaithful wife (in Effect, the wife's extramarital dalliance seems to include more than just tiramisu) still have a marriage worth saving. It's a twist on the classic: "If you love something, go outside with it into a field of toxic plants. If you survive, then your marriage is sound. If you're driven to abruptly strangle yourself with the garden hose, it never was."
But the best moment in The Green Effect comes in one of its descriptions of action: "The house by the road becomes very quiet as THE TREES WHISPER MISCHIEVOUSLY." You'd think nothing could be more difficult for a director than teaching Mark Wahlberg to act entirely with his right eyebrow, as he does through most of The Happening, but that's because you didn't know Shyamalan could've, instead, ended up standing in a grove of trees trying to explain to them that their whispering wasn't mischievous enough.
I should note that Wahlberg's "mood ring" metaphor is not merely snatched out of the air. One of the many, many ridiculous elements of the film that I didn't manage to get into my list was an (apparently vestigial) subplot about Elliot and Alma's penchant for mood rings. Ah, what might have been.
--Christopher Orr