Excellent beginning & details, but poor script logic and horrible ending

Rating: 6/10 (3 August 2002)

This movie is so promising. A lovely cast, good dialogue, sharp directing early on.
Oy.
Sadly, the movie is kind of a mess, though Gibson and the kids give pretty good performances.
Spoilers. * * *
At one point, the Hesses are in a pizza parlour, talking about the paranoia gripping the small town after crop circles are discovered. Then, the director pans to a man walking to his van. The man is, the director, an Indian man who is walking in small town American while the cast talks about fear of outsiders.
What a great moment, I thought.
Unfortunately, I missed a key piece of dialogue. The Indian man, it turns out, was the town vet who'd fallen asleep at the wheel of his truck and killed Mrs. Hess several months before. And that's why everyone was eyeing him so warily.
That was the first of many disappointments in this movie.
Actually, the logical gaffes start earlier. We are supposed to believe that no airplanes or helicopters fly over Bucks County. So that the Hess's massive crop circle is completely unknown by anyone outside of the family and a very tired sheriff. How could it have remained unnoticed??
We're supposed to have a sense of growing paranoia about the possible alien invasion. (Our local movie critic, a man who typically writes intelligent reviews, completely lost it over this point - he felt that no one would be afraid of an alien invasion since everyone had seen ET. But everyone's also seen Independence Day...) That was generally pretty well-handled, except that Hesses completely loose it before it's clear that the aliens are probably malevolent. The aliens pretty much stay up in their spaceships and send down periodic reconnaisance. They don't level cities like in Independence Day.
The Hesses nail themselves into their old farmhouse, then go into the basement (a great place for a boy with severe asthma to hang out). The aliens make a lot of noise (shades of Close Encounters without the backlighting!), but never actually invade the room. When an alien finally meets up with the family, you can absolutely see the ending coming from about the middle of the movie.
The last quarter or so of the movie, and the director way overusing himself in what should have been a walk-on, were very problematic. M. Night Shyamalan also has a bad habit of recapping his movie near the end. While it was effective (and almost necessary) in The Sixth Sense, it was really ridiculous in this instance. And using that moment to flashback to Mrs. Hess' death completely broke the tension in the "now" of the movie.
I liked The Sixth Sense quite a bit, and found Unbreakable flawed, but interesting. However, Signs, particularly the last half hour, is just plain dumb. And extremely disappointing. I think Shyamalan, the director, needs to fire Shyamalan the writer before something worse happens.