For Its 1, 2, 3 Strikes You're Out At the Old Ball Game

Rating: 1/10 (31 August 2006)

I recently saw this movie on DVD and I was really looking forward to it because I remember how much they were promoting it when it first came out, and after all, it was a Mel Gibson movie (with Joaquin Phoenix as the icing on the cake, how bad could it be?). I read most of the reviews on here before I saw the movie.
For the first hour, I was on the edge of the couch, totally riveted to my television screen as I waited to find out what was going to happen next. But. . . in the back of my mind I was thinking "I'm sure this isn't simply going to turn out to be about some stupid green aliens who supposedly want to take over the world. The crop signs have to mean something else, and they are just trying to mislead us by implying that it really is about aliens." Boy was I wrong! Slowly, I came to the realization that this movie was the biggest piece of crap that I've ever sat through. No, it isn't a "thinking person's movie" unless you are remedial and on drugs. Why is it that every slow-moving, pseudo-spiritual film is thought to be so profound - are we trying to fool ourselves into liking this garbage? Are we afraid to admit just how silly the movie really is so we pretend that it has a deeper meaning to justify our having been foolish enough to spend 2 hours watching this drivel? Are we really such gullible sheep?
Grant Hess was shallow, grim and boring - I didn't believe one single emotion he was pretending to have. I can't even imagine how he ever became an Episcopalian priest. Surely, as a priest he had to deal with life and death issues before so why would he think he would somehow be exempt from sorrow or death in his personal life? Isn't he supposed to believe in an after-life and feel that his wife has "gone to a better place?" How could he have enough Christian faith to even become a priest yet when he is faced with a personal tragedy of his own, be so quick to abandon his beliefs? It made him seem like a hypocrite - "I'm a man of God but the minute I'm faced with a personal tragedy, I'm done with religion." How shallow is that? I certainly wouldn't want him to be my priest. Then, when he is faced with the prospect of evil aliens, all of a sudden he knows exactly what God is thinking and why things happen the way they do. What a simplistic ass!
The children were acting more like aliens than the green dudes - they were unnaturally pale, emotionless, coldly logical and moved like they had taken one too many tranquilizers. Even the sheriff seemed like she was on Valium. After she asked them a few questions about the intruder in their cornfields, we never saw her again. It made you wonder if that town was peopled with humanoid robots.
Evidently, Shamalyan doesn't know anything about dogs - do some research, buddy. No German shepherd is going to turn on his owners the way the one in the movie did - if anything, he would be trying to protect the children and probably give his life protecting them, not try to kill them because he sensed a few green strangers lurking around.
What about that wife? - she was supposedly sliced in half by a truck and held together because she was wedged between two vehicles, yet she was able to have a last inane chat with her husband.
I don't think any of the characters were well developed and you really didn't know what made any of them tick. You didn't get a sense of what their life was normally like until this whole crop circle business started. If this was a working farm, where were the hired hands? Why would you be terrified of these so-called signs and assume that they had to be related to aliens?
If you were mindless enough to stay in a deserted house and face down beings who wanted to kill you, wouldn't you at least have a stockpile of things to use as weapons like knives, axes, tire iron, whatever? Wouldn't you put aside food and water and blankets for your family before barricading yourself in the basement and wouldn't you have enough sense to make sure your child had his medicine? The way that little boy was snorting on that inhaler every few minutes, I'm surprised there was anything left in it. If his asthma was that severe, he shouldn't have been on a farm at all.
And how stupid were the aliens - just stand there while someone beats you to death with a baseball bat or fall and wait for a glass of water to fall on your head and melt you. Who says extraterrestrials are supposedly superior? Wherever these airheads were from (The Naked, Stupid, Clueless Planet for Green Rejects, I'm guessing), I'm surprised they survived at all.
I didn't care about anyone in this film and as far as I was concerned the green men could have slurped all of them down.