Surprisingly Lame

Rating: Null/10 (19 January 2003)

Someone brought this movie to my house tonight and, recalling that I had read somewhere that it had grossed almost $300 million, thought maybe it wouldn't be too bad. The Sixth Sense was pretty original and fooled me right till the end - millions of people can't be that far off, right? Wrong.
** Spoilers to follow. **
The essential problem with this film is that it takes so long to figure out if the aliens are actually bad guys or not. Maybe this is my fault for thinking about it too much, but I'm convinced that the way the film is put together bears more than a little of the blame. Here's what I mean. The aliens make nice looking and weirdly beautiful crop circles and don't, initially at least, seem to be too malevolent. We catch an occasional glimpse of them but nobody is getting eaten or anything. In fact, we're not totally sure until a fair ways into the film that the signs are, indeed `signs' and the work of alien intelligence and not some hoax. Furthermore, the aliens have these funny/cute voices that sound a lot like the way dolphins speak and surely we've all seen enough movies to know by now how *very* smart dolphins are. Was this going to be like ET: a sci-fi reprimand of how our natural instinct to freak out and kill the thing we don't instantly recognize is actually a serious character flaw? Or was it going to be a re-telling of some good old-fashioned "War of the Worlds" flick. I don't think the answer to this essential question was ever especially clear in my mind or, for that matter, M. Night Shyamalan's.
To be honest I was expecting the now-indispensable Shyamalan Twist Ending to lead me down the "aliens are just folks like you and me" path. By now in Hollywood movies I'm used to kids and dogs and other such unsophiticates being held up as the truest barometers of what is really real in the universe. I mentioned ET already, but the list of such movies could go on for miles and include films like Phenomenon and even The Sixth Sense. In fact, isn't that what The Sixth Sense is basically about? Ghosts who, like the vomiting girl, initially scare us adults half to death are revealed, through the eyes of a child, to actually be tragic figures trapped by their unjust or untimely deaths. Having such recent films as my context, I was wondering up to the very end of Signs if perhaps these aliens had just been misunderstood and that their motives in attacking the house were really - I don't know - misguided attempts to honour the wide-eyed little girl Bo as their queen or something similarly sappy. When Graham (Gibson) cuts off the fingers of the alien in the pantry haven't we been trained by other films to wonder if the claws reaching out wasn't some misunderstood gesture of friendship or, at worst, desperation? When Merrill Hess (Phoenix) goes up the stairs out of the cellar at the end of the film the symbols blasted through the door above seem to be very creative and beautiful - moons and stars; certainly not obviously the destructive work of some demon-spawn hell-bent on creating mayhem and destruction. But eventually we find out that, in fact, the aliens are as bad as can be. Too bad it's ten minutes from the end of the film!
So, it was bad enough that the movie took so long to really engage me and have me figure out who to cheer for, but the actual punchline is even worse. It turns out that the whole crux of the story is that a message from the wife-with-one-foot-in-the-grave can be as fatuous as "Believe in Coincidences. Oh, and by the way, when you see a nasty alien in our house get your troubled/funny brother to beat the crap out of him with a baseball bat until he falls against a bureau and you suddenly discover that in fact something as simple as the water our spooky/angelic daughter always found funny tasting is as deadly as cyanide to these guys.' Give me a break!
After all, this movie is lousy because it cannot make up it mind. Is it an update of the creature feature movies of a xenophobic, isolationist 1950s America or is it more in line with the `tolerance is best' emphasis of Close Encounters in the later 20th Century? Signs wants to be everything to everyone and ends up being nothing for anybody beyond a few cheap thrills from (Children of the) cornfield steadycam shots and loud telephones in quiet rooms. Ultimately too thuggish and macho to be tender, too obvious and campy to be ironic, too sentimental to be truly scary, and too shallow to be as profound as it so desperately wants to be. 4/10