Great while watching but...

Rating: 7/10 (5 August 2002)

I had a lot of unanswered questions afterwords. M. Night Shyamalan is a great visual director...there are some beautiful shots here. But with plots...
Farmer Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) finds gigantic, interconnected circles in his cornfield. His brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) and Graham's two children (Rory Culkin, Abigail Breslin) think there's something supernatural going on. Graham disagrees...until things start getting real scary. Also Graham keeps having nightmares about his dead wife who died in a car accident and made him give up being a pastor...
SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!
The film is very creepy and eerie in the first half (the first full view of the aliens made me jump and the pantry sequence!) but drops the ball in the second half. For one thing, you think it's an alien invasion story but it turns into a story about faith. The aliens are just there as a plot device!
Also giving us long shots of the aliens was not a good idea--it's very clear that they're guys in rubber suits. Still, it did scare me occasionally.
MORE SPOILERS!!!! But, afterwords, I had a lot of questions. Why do the aliens (who can be killed by water) attack a planet that is 3/4 water? Why do they attack in the first place (there's something about harvesting people...what does that mean?)? One alien is locked inside a pantry and can't get out???? Also how exactly are they defeated at the end (we're not told)? These are nagging questions that I couldn't shake off.
And the film is quiet...way too quiet at times. And the faith story is awkwardly handled.
The acting doesn't help. Gibson is blank-faced the entire time and Culkin and Breslin are terrible. Phoenix tries but the slow pace and insistence on quiet drags him down.
So, it's worth seeing...if you don't think about it afterwords.