This "Birds" rip-off makes a great gift for enemies...

Rating: Null/10 (22 September 2002)

My boyfriend insisted and I acquiesced . I "knew" this film would be lamer than a three-legged octopus. I could "see" the tedium before it enveloped us in the theater at the lovely new casino off of the strip in Las Vegas. The experience of seeing films in the theater gets heightened these days with the LOUD trailers and the computer-designed Welcomes before the film. The lights dim and "signs" [sic] (I will have my fun!) begins. Ah, people in the cinema. Ah, people in the cinema scared a bit by the sudden film cuts and Dolby bumps and our contagious sarcasm wafting o'er the seats like the *Spoiler?* poison gas of the (unscramble so as not to be a spoiler) ISANLIE.
To stretch this soft bit of bombast on the bias, "signs" ' director/writer/producer/egregious cameo of the most pretentious self-consciousness a nerd can splay/mother/father/brother/good cop/... takes away two hours (oops, almost wrote "years") away from the viewer's life, therefore this film would, to order, make a lovely gift for someone you don't really like. Just warn the others...
The film borrows from Alfred Hitchcock's super "The Birds" (1963). It borrows the mood, being trapped in a house, the flashlight "tour" (here relegated to bottom of the barrel actions by our tedious male dults --is that "projection," director?), the teary eyes of the cast, like our good cop who gives good Jessica Tandy. There are the pictorialized gazes at the mysterious, clouded skies. And Mel Gibson is the spitting image of Rod Taylor as Mitch Brenner in the original, but he's emoting like Tippi Hedren!
So it borrows from "Birds." So the director "gets it" when a master hits us full force, the way David Lynch has learned but still can't quite paint the same way. So! That's just a comment. This film is like a pungent but thin Jean Rhys novel left to rot in misty watercolors of the insensitive mind of a male. I'm sorry to say that, especially since I am male. A sensitive, feminine epiphany, common in better Indian epics, threads its way through this torture of glasses of water and faux-macho Joaquin posturing. I doubt you'll be able to appreciate it.
Lame film about aliens not being the nerdy hoaxsters of England's '70s past, an option trammeled immediately. Some dumb, illogical touches jump out afterward. A good example: Mel follows his children's cries into the cornfields. He finds a crop circle. Camera pans up and there are more circles, unbeknownst to them. It does not engage the viewer. It is a stale movement. And then there is no helicopter investigation for the Philly media. So it's suddenly global. Flashbacks, Star Trek time wormholes, wicked witched killed by water, murdered dogs (?!).
I did not very much care for this movie. Mel Gibson is losing it, but good. God, I miss Carl Sagan!
I hope, gentle readers, that my review has taken you on a copy-cat journey, like the "cut-about, jumble it with snail pacing ("thought?") and a cavalcade of symbols" journey of this film. I should've known, because an infant in the lovely, new theater was throwing up harshly a little after the film started.