Great thriller!

Rating: 10/10 (8 August 2002)

The newest film in the legacy of M. Night Shyamalan, SIGNS manages to pull off some very effective creepiness in the very beginning and also holds your interesting throughout the course of the film. Mel Gibson is great, aswell as Joaquin Phoenix. The film was very creepy and contains steadily mounting terror. Vaguely similar to Mark Pellington's THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, the film keeps you on the edge of your seat until the very end.
The film is scary and in some cases, disturbing. The aliens are very well designed. The film actually surprised me. I was not expecting Shyamalan to stick with the story so very closely throughout the entire film almost. With his earlier works, THE SIXTH SENSE and UNBREAKABLE, he focuses on the relationships between family members very closely to create a lot of drama that has a payoff. But, most of this film is taken up by fast-moving situations that involve alien activity and crop circles. My only complaint, and I mean 'only', is that the film tries way too hard to be funny. It tries much harder than Shyamalan's earlier works and is the type of humor that is not 'laugh-out-loud', but it is funny because you were not expecting it in a sci-fi suspense thriller. The sequences of the film that are scary, ARE scary. They could have been a little more effectively done, but otherwise, they were very well-crafted. SIGNS is a great movie that will live in movie history forever in both the genres of thriller and sci-fi. SIGNS gets 5/5.