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BY MAGGIE SCOTT

Terrorism takes a back seat to the natural world fighting back against the destruction brought by human exploitation of the environment in M. Night Shyamalan’s sniggeringly dull thriller, “The Happening.”

For exactly five minutes in the opening scenes the director/writer raises the hairs on the back of your neck. After that, the laughable idiocy is enough to curl your hair. To the ominous sounds of wind at 8:33 a.m. on a placid day in New York City’s Central Park, humans halt in their tracks, fixated by what will later be classified as “an event.”

Unseen and unheard, a force takes hold of man and woman alike and compels them to take their own lives. Construction workers throw themselves off skyscrapers; a girl stabs herself in the neck with the needle of her hair fastener; a cab driver picks up a dead policeman’s revolver and shoots himself—an action repeated by others until the weapon is empty.

Cut to Philadelphia and our hero—a high school science teacher using the still-unsolved mystery of vanishing honeybees to illustrate the need to be respectful of natural laws and to know that there are forces at work “beyond our understanding.”

Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) believes in the power of science to address critical human issues, but his own life is out of balance with the natural order. He and Alma, his emotionally blocked wife (Zooey Deschanel), are childless. She is hiding the fact that she has encouraged the attentions of another man. Together with Elliot’s colleague Julian (John Leguizamo) and his daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez), they hop a crowded train out of the evacuating town; hoping that whatever is happening in the big cities can’t reach into the countryside.

But, in Filbert, PA, as the Moores take Jess while Julian goes searching for his wife, it becomes clear that many more people will die while the authorities are trying to come up with a hypothesis to explain it. Is it poison gas from nuclear power plants? Is the toxin’s potency diminished as humans disperse into smaller and smaller groups? What exactly sets off an event? Is it a diabolical government plot? (Is this a new version of Agatha Christie’s 10 Little Indians?)

Shyamalan never draws more than wooden acting out of either his extras or his professionals, which, together with the graphic violence, will dump the movie’s DVD right into the deep discount bin marked “zombie” flicks.

A Blinding Edge Pictures production, Twentieth Century Fox release, rated R for violence.

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