The signs point to a terrible film

Rating: 1/10 (8 October 2002)

Contains spoilers
When The Sixth Sense was released three years ago, the previously unheralded M. Night Shyamalan found himself with one hell of a hit on his hands. I watched it with the hype in mind and didn't particularly enjoy it. Yes, the plot twist was good but the rest of the film meandered without aim. Shyamalan's follow-up Unbreakable was given a harder time by critics and audiences alike. I liked it, certainly more than The Sixth Sense, but it was not a film that lingered long in the memory. It was one of those films that you didn't really need to see in the cinema, which is damning it with faint praise but there you go. So it was with some trepidation, and as I was to discover, foolhardiness, that I paid my money to see Signs. I had been warned off it but there was nothing else to see and two hours to kill.
I'll get to the point: this film was about as lame as it gets. It was in essence more of the same slop from Shyamalan. One could argue that it's his individualism, a trademark style that permeates all his films. I would argue it is plain laziness. If Shyamalan is trying to make as much money as possible with as little effort, then this film embodies that attitude. Each of his films has a premise that is initially a good one - in Signs it is the ever-intriguing argument of fate versus coincidence. However, Shyamalan fails to flesh out this concept beyond a hushed conversation between Gibson and Phoenix. It is a total waste of a good idea, certainly on a film that quickly falls into the usual 'aliens are coming' trap. I might have been more prepared to accept such a tired old routine if the aliens had done something other than bang a few doors and create immaculate crop circles. How is the audience supposed to buy into the supposed fear of the characters when the intergalactic enemy makes little more nuisance than a bored teenager? The aliens weakness is water, exactly the same as that of Bruce Willis' character in Unbreakable. Shyamalan is recycling his own ideas! Give me strength. And his insistence on putting religion at the heart of his work irks me greatly - the motto of 'keep the faith and everything will be alright' is mawkish, indolent and unrealistic.
How many more times can filmmakers expect the public to believe that the alien on screen is not just a tall guy in a green jumpsuit? The scene where you are given your first glimpse of the invaders in a South American home movie is laughable. When are we going to see some imagination used in cinematic close encounters? Are they all going to have heads, legs and arms? A dodgy extra-terrestrial might have been passable if the story was any good. It's not. For a film knocking on for two hours long, absolutely nothing happens. Instead you get the usual 'deep' Shyamalan dialogue, which is in fact pretentious bullshit, trying to mask the absence of plot. His direction is based upon building an eerie atmosphere but if there's nothing going on within that, the viewer is left with nothing to get their teeth in. The film drags its feet so often that I'm surprised it didn't trip over and fall out of the projector. Gibson fails to convince as a man of the cloth (he's too gnarled for that s**t), Phoenix's Merrill is an intense weirdo with some bizarre, apropos of nothing lines and the two kids are plain irritating (they hired a Culkin for Christ's sake).
By the time the alien that visits the family farm is killed off - in a manner so damn corny it challenges belief - I was looking forward to doing something other than watch this sorry mess. It cost a reported $70m to make which is arguably the biggest shock of the whole movie. I shall never see another M. Night Shyamalan film as long as I live. He is being spoken of as the next Steven Speilberg (from whom he borrowed a couple of suspense-evoking techniques for this film) but such a suggestion couldn't be wider of the mark. Spielberg can enchant, enthral but above all entertain. When Shyamalan learns to do any of these, somebody let me know. He is, however, a fine con artist, capable of extracting millions of pounds from the public in return for absolutely nothing. If you cannot see through this wafer thin film then you deserve to be visited by a tall man in a green costume in the middle of the night. Just have a baseball bat or a glass of water handy...