SIGNS (2002)  0

Reviewed 8/31/02

Newsweek magazine’s recent cover sporting M. Night Shyamalan as the next Steven Spielberg only goes to show how entrenched media publicists are in disseminating hype as news.  The Indian-born, Philadelphia-raised writer-director responsible for THE SIXTH SENSE and UNBREAKABLE might have a knack for flashy film style, but he has little sense for story or character, much less theme.  If he mimics Spielberg, it’s the Spielberg of JURASSIC PARK, not JAWS.  Shyamalan defenders note his filmmaking talent.  Well, it certainly takes talent to concoct something so profoundly idiotic as SIGNS.

In SIGNS, Shyamalan takes the famous hoax of “unexplained” crop circles and turns it into a science fiction horror movie.  The film picks up the story of Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) six months after leaving his position of church reverend.  Responsible for his decision is a car accident that killed his wife (perpetrated by a neighbor played by Shyamalan himself), shaking Graham’s faith in the Almighty.  He and his two children, Morgan (Rory Culkin) and Bo (Abigail Breslin), now live on a farmhouse with his brother, Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), a former baseball player.  When the crop formations mysteriously appear in Graham’s fields one day, Morgan says, “I think God did it,” but it turns out to be strategic markings setting up an alien invasion.   While Graham and Merrill try to remain rational, the children, to keep the aliens from reading their minds, don aluminum hats that make them look like giant Hershey’s kisses.

Isolating a worldwide alien invasion to the events occurring at a rural farmhouse is an interesting idea (even if aliens invading such a place makes no sense), and pleasantly for once, there is not much in the movie in terms of special effects.  Instead, Shyamalan gets some mileage by keeping the threat offscreen for the most part and letting our imagination work overtime.  Only, it gets to the point where Shyamalan’s decision not to show things might be because he doesn’t know how.  A fight scene in pitch darkness serves up frustration, not excitement.  When the aliens finally do appear, they are so blandly-conceived that the better reason not to show them would be because they look really stupid (instead of little green men, they are big green men).

The lame science fiction plot is really all an excuse by Shyamalan to zero in on his real interest in the film – the message of faith – except Shyamalan’s faith is a total abstraction.  He asks us to have faith but in what and to what end?  For example, recent events have shown that faith in obtaining 72 virgins in heaven not to be a good thing.  In a sermonizing sequence, Shyamalan delineates two types of people, those hopeful people who believe everything happens for a purpose and those fearful ones who believe everything occurs to unguided chance.  Talk about a ludicrously stacked and simplified dichotomy.  Shyamalan’s philosophy is so hackneyed, it would be a wonder if he has ever picked up a tome on existentialism.

The characters try to rationalize away the possibility of aliens, which is entirely appropriate behavior, but the only reason Shyamalan is able to fool them is that this is a world of his fiction.  And it is a contrived one at that – not just in the coincidences Shyamalan puts together in Rube Goldberg fashion to make his point, but in the basic premise that allows it all to work – the earth is being invaded by aliens more moronic than Homer Simpson.  What kind of invasion is stopped by a wooden door?

Furthermore, having no grasp of his subject, Shyamalan is talking out of his posterior.  A friend noted that Graham appears to be a Catholic priest.  He wears a Roman collar, is called “father,” and in an unfunny joke, he takes a confession from a pharmacy clerk feeling guilty for cursing.  Yet Graham is married with children.  Furthermore, Shyamalan engages in gross sentimentality that would make even Spielberg blush.  Prepare for the gag reflex during schmaltzy scenes of family hugs and Graham’s describing the birth of his children.  Every actor in the film is replaceable, though Mel Gibson actually fares best, for once not playing an action hero.