Pretentious Garbage

Rating: Null/10 (5 August 2002)

As I felt when I walked out of Unbreakable, I want to find M. Night Shaymalan, and hurt him. We're talking baseball-bat-to-the-knees hurt. This is because I: 1) wasted ANOTHER 2 good hours of my life under the false feeling that this one would be good, 2) the film is long and boring, and the pay-off is non-existent, unless you buy into the director's empty pretensions, and 3) the suspense is very cheaply manipulated and manufactured. The only small consolation is that he seems to only have 2 more films in him before he's run out of his bag of tricks. This one already show serious "signs" of creative fatigue.
This film is unbearably pretentious, though not quite as bad as Unbreakable. I was surprised for the first hour that things actually HAPPEN at a quick clip, unlike in Unbreakable, but he makes up for it by slowing the pace in the second hour. Is there an alien clawing at the door? What better time for a 45-second shot of a stationary flashlight! Are spaceships landing outside? Then how about showing a blank wall for a full minute? Is your house being invaded by aliens? That's the right time for a long, lugubrious flashback, or a Hallmark-level family reminescence! That'd be GREAT! It is a CHEAP suspense tactic to simply NOT SHOW something that is happening, or have your actors take 10 times longer to react to something. That's not skill, it's pretentious manipulation, it's the main reason Shymalan better stay away from me when I've got a weapon in my hand. This film would be 1/2 hour shorter if we didn't have to endure such maddeningly long takes. They may generate suspense, but not honorably. Compared to Hitchcock my ass. Most reviews say "Shymalan knows that what's not shown is scarier than what is." Well, in this case, that's because, shown or not shown, NOTHING IS HAPPENING.
The entire story is truly non-existent. Basically, something is ABOUT to happen, ABOUT to happen, ABOUT to happen (this is the "suspense" part), then, oops, it doesn't happen. The end. The entire story utterly flies apart at the end, makes ZERO sense, and is VERY unsatisfying. What we get instead is a extremely flimsy, sub-Oprah-level meditation of "faith." Well guess what, M. Night? When you tie your "message" into a story that ultimately turns out to be a big flat deflated balloon, your "message" is invalidated as well. There was an article in the 8/4/2002 NYTimes about "nonmovies." Movies that SEEM to have emotion, style, and substance, but it's all recycled, and only REFERS to emotion and substance. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to "Signs."
I do think Shymalan can be compared to George Lucas... a filmmaker who thinks that everyone should spend great amounts of attention and thought to his work, but doesn't think you should have any incentive to do so, and doesn't think they should be rewarded for their effort, because the SIMPLE JOY OF WATCHING A FILM BY M. NIGHT SHYMALAN SHOULD BE REWARD ENOUGH!!!! This is called "Narcissim."
The increasingly hysterical opening credits offer a clue of what is to come. There IS one effective moment, later, the newscast of the birthday party. But, let me ask you, how many newscasts will include the preceeding 45-seconds of birthday party video footage before the thing we're waiting for happens? Only M. Night Shymalan's newscast. I can see a parody of him on Saturday Night Live: as Mel Gibson is grappling with an alien, Shymalan points his camera at a stationary paper cup. "Okay," he says, "the alien breaks in--cut to the cup! The cup is NOT MOVING!! The cup is ABSOLUTELY STILL! There is NO MOVEMENT from the cup!"