Scary, funny but not emotional

Rating: Null/10 (6 August 2002)

Warning: Spoilers
Signs is a good movie, better than some of the stuff I've seen this summer, but it does not live up to Shyamalan's 'Sixth Sense' and cannot compare to 'Unbreakable.' 'Signs' is scary, no doubt about it (I will be sleeping entirely under the covers for weeks) but the ending was a pathetic. Thinking back to the 'Sixth Sense', the ending was a surprise and clever.
In 'Unbreakable' the ending made the entire movie disturbing and sent shivers up your spine. This ending just makes you feel uncomfortable because you know something was missed and your trying to understand what is so surprising about it.
When I went to see this hoping for an intense sci-fi horror film. Instead we get this religious propaganda to add to whole patriotic and religious thing we got going on in post-September eleventh world. I was hoping the aliens and how they are torturing this one farm family would be the main idea but instead it is all about this ex-reverend and how he's questioning his faith after his wife's death. Like we haven't heard that story before. But people will enjoy it anyway, even the "Group Number Two" people will manage put up with it, but the ending almost ruins the whole movie.
I can't find the surprisement and cleverness in how it is all in God's plan to defeat the one alien that gets into the Hess's house. Morgan's athsma prevents him from being killed by the poison gas. Bo's water problem enables them easy access at water so they can melt the alien to death, and the dead wife's dying words prompt the uncle to grabbing his baseball bat off the wall so he can beat the alien to death in hand to hand combat. Okay? See what I mean about the lack of imagination. I give this movie a two and a half. The music is awesome and there are some particularly funny parts (my favorite is when Gibson and Phoenix are running around the house, thinking they're chasing their vandal-neighbors and Gibson, still against the cursing, is shouting, "I am insane with anger!"). I give points to the little girl, Bo, because she doesn't just rely on her cuteness to make her character look real. Though, the relationship the children have with their father is sort of a rip off of the relationship between the two children and their mother in the 'Others.'