Close encounters of a 3rd rate kind.

Rating: 5/10 (4 August 2002)

After the great movie "The 6th Sense" and an even better movie, "Unbreakable", the next movie from "the next Speilberg" (a line that Newsweek stole from me) was bound to be heavily anticipated and with "Signs" M. Night Shyamalan stumbles. "Signs" isn't a major misfire from this major talent, but it certainly misses its mark. This is the year's 2nd major dissappointment (Star Wars II ranking alongside of it). It is a beautifully mounted film with a great message that says that nothing is accidental. The shocks are "Boo!" B-movie variety, the acting is constricted by the weight gloom and doom yhat pervades the movie and I wonder if the X-Files hadn't been canceled if the aliens would have been available to work on this movie. Until the very end it never involved me emotionally the way Night's previous 2 movies had. The acting is a major problem. I felt that Mel Gibson (an excellent actor and a very powerful one) and Joaquin Phoenix were straitjacketed by their director. Their was really no catharsis. The buildup was never delivered. If this movie was "CE3K" we needed a mothership scene. If this movie was "War Of The Worlds" we needed a major destruction set piece. In "Unbreakable" Night pulled back from showing us a horrendous train crash, but he got a way with it because it almost began the movie. "Signs" doesn't give the big set piece that we so desparately awaited. A lot of things that "Unbreakable"'s detractors said were wrong that movie are evident here. I also think that we needed to see Graham's wife's death in its entirety at the start of this movie rather than in flashbacks, because too late in this movie do you really feel his pain. A few months (or years) from now I think "Signs" will be viewed like Speilberg's "1941" as not being a bad movie but also as being a not very good one either.