sub-Spielberg, but worth a viewing

Rating: 7/10 (30 October 2002)

This movie certainly owes a debt to Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but the director is skilled enough to make it his own.
One of the best decisions Shyamalan made was to show as little as possible of the aliens. And he is very good at setting up his scares. A good example is the scene where Phoenix is watching the first videotaped footage of an alien sighting - very creepy.
Tak Fujimoto (Twin Peaks, The Silence of the Lambs, The Sixth Sense) is becoming one of my favourite cinematographers. His camera work is extremely effective at creating moods, usually without drawing attention to itself.
The cast is uniformly good (except for cop Cherry Jones, whose backwoods act is not believable). Mel Gibson is limited as an actor, but this is his best work to date.
However, there are some things Shyamalan is not so clever at setting up. He was on the right track in wanting the sci-fi elements to be grafted onto a solid dramatic story, but his script veers from intelligent to heavy-handed.
The biggest eye-rollers are the daughter's conspicuous glasses-of-water neurosis, and the phrase "swing away", which is ridiculously built up to be an earth-shattering revelation. I don't think Mel needed to remember his wife's last words to come up with the brilliant idea that helps save his son's life.