Not much awe or mystery here

Rating: 2/10 (24 May 2005)

"The man who invented the telescope found out more about heaven than the closed eyes of prayer ever discovered." -- Robert G. Ingersoll.
This film reminded me of late 1999, when all the lunatic fringe fundamentalists were preparing for the End of Days. Would a God really schedule Doomsday using something as human and arbitrary as the Gregorian calendar? I wondered what all those boneheads would do when January 1, 2000 rolled around and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAPPENED except one more rotation of the Earth. They seem to have crawled back into the woodwork where they belong. That's what this film does: Starts out not with a bang but with a loud whisper and then ends with a pathetic whimper. Roger Ebert gave this film four stars, but he has never been too reliable about films dealing with Christianity, medicine or sci-fi. Never mind starting with a bang and ending with a whimper: Signs starts out small and then fizzles entirely. You think that it is leading up to some truly great ending, but then the film takes refuge in cozy, bland, reassuring religious platitudes that contend that there is a Purpose To It All.
The story of extraterrestrial contact has taken many forms: Orgies of outrageous xenophobia like The Invaders from Mars or Independence Day. Cautionary tales such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (philosophically interesting but scientifically awful). Voyages of transcendental wonder like 2001, Contact and Close Encounters. And on and on. Signs tries to take a different approach, but suffers from a massive failure of imagination.
Some things about this film I like. For once, a sci-fi film isn't a wretched excess of techno-violence. It takes place on a farm in Pennsylvania. There isn't a computer in sight. You see and hear a lot of wood: Boots and shoes clomping on wooden floors and verandas. Nature is never far away. The house looks like it's really lived in, by people of modest means. There are no damsels in distress or tough-talking Amazon weapons experts. The actors, as in all of Shyamalan's films, try hard for non-acting. Compare Mel Gibson's performance in this film and the Lethal Weapon films and you'll see what I mean.
But wait: Was Graham (the Gibson character) both a farmer AND a minister before he lost his faith? His cornfields look awfully lush for being those of a former non-farmer. Not that he seems to take much interest in his fields. Also, where is the barn? Where is the heavy equipment? Where are his workers, if he has any? When the crop circles appear in his fields, no one shows up from the government or the media. Maybe that's not too far-fetched, but after it becomes clear that the crop circles may well be harbingers of an invasion from space, wouldn't you have troops with weapons and federal agents all over your farm? And these aliens: Would an alien who could easily get onto your roof and nimbly elude capture by two men in good physical condition really get caught in a bathroom, unable to get out? Would aliens who can cross space be so baffled by ORDINARY WOODEN DOORS? Why would an alien in your living room just stand there, not trying to get away or strike back, while you swung a baseball bat at him? Would an alien with evil designs on humans, e.g., to kill and eat them or drug and enslave them, really venture out onto an alien planet alone, unarmed, and WITHOUT A SPACE SUIT? Wouldn't they move in groups and carry weapons? Would an alien hungry for human flesh, and able to assimilate terrestrial protein, really find plain old tap water so toxic? Would aliens who found tap water so toxic really have designs on our planet, which is, after all, kind of a wet place? If aliens really wanted to abduct people for their evil purposes, why would any be out in the middle of nowhere in sparsely populated rural Pennsylvania instead of zinging a transporter beam onto a street in Bombay or Bangkok and netting a couple of thousand beggars? Maybe he was an E.T., a lone alien accidentally left behind, but this film neither answers that question nor even asks it. There are probably those who would reply that that isn't the point, that the real story is about the human characters in the film, but as I see it, if the whole plot is absurd, from beginning to end, how can the character studies make any sense?
I can imagine how much this film appealed to Mel Gibson because he has extremely primitive religious views. He is a member of a small Catholic sect that rejects the liberalization of the Catholic Church that began with Pope John XXIII and Vatican II. Maybe that explains his massive victim complex. Look at his films: With some exceptions (e.g., What Women Want), he tends to play deeply wronged men who are taking revenge, to wit: the Mad Max films, Payback (!), Conspiracy Theory, The River, Braveheart, Ransom, The Bounty, etc. Few recent films have been better than "Signs" at taking the awe, mystery and grandeur of the universe and trying to squeeze it into a little religious box created by superstitious primitives who lived a couple of thousand years ago.