How Would You Stand Up to Aliens?

Rating: 9/10 (13 February 2005)

Some movies are seen as one type, when it really is another. Signs is one of them. Most moviegoers thought they were going in to see an alien invasion movie, when in fact Signs is a study of what would one family do if there was a terrible threat from above. The ultimate ending of the planet Earth is not hanging in the balance through the action we see, rather, just the fate of one family. M. Night Shyamalan's third feature film chronicles a rural family living outside of Philadelphia where crop circles begin to appear in the corn fields. The setup is there, and Shyamalan uses the expectation of aliens going "bump" in the night to play on the audience's fears and create a tense mood of what could be. Mel Gibson plays the father who was once an Episcopilian priest who left the flock after the death of his wife. He lives with his two young children, well acted by Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin, and his brother, played by Joaquin Phoenix on a farm in the middle of acres of corn. The focus of the movie is entirely on the family, with the only outside contact coming through their television, as they watch newscaster trying to figure out what is going on in the world. Here, the talking heads on TV are not plot-movers, they are experiencing the same doubt and fear that the families watching at home are going through. My favorite scene in the film is that of when a Brazilian family catch a glimpse of an alien. It has a certain realness to it, as if we were going to catch home video of an alien, it would look just like it does in the movie. The ultimate resolution of the movie has been a source of consternation among moviegoers, if you think really hard about it, on the surface it may not make sense, but you do not know how desperate the invaders are and what kind of risks they will take, even if that means invading a planet that is 80% harmful. The important thing is that it does not matter how it ends, the important part of Signs is how the family deals with the invasion, not how it ends. We can identify with the family, we can put ourselves in their shoes. What would we do? No phasers here, just trying to survive. I appreciated the change, not all alien movies have to end with hi-tech, Buck Rogers weapons.