The film is better than all the critics make it out to be.

Rating: 8/10 (1 June 2008)

Okay, just to clarify - this is not M. Night Shyamalan's BEST work. However, this movie is still good, and does not deserve all the abuse that seems to be hurled at it here.
Within the movie, all the key points which people say make it an awful movie, are explained, and if you just think logically, you will notice this.
Overly Relgious: Some people claim that the film is overly religious, however it is religion that is being promoted - it is faith, which is different. The movie can be interpreted many different ways; this is just one of them.
Aliens have interstellar technology and cannot open doors: Aliens, like the name suggests, do not know our planet, and most likely have never encountered doors, and locked doors for that matter also, so they do not IMMEDIATELY know how to open them. HOWEVER if you notice within the film they are referred to as "problem solvers" which is how they discovered how to get into the coal shoot. This explains how the alien which Mel Gibson cuts its fingers off, must have learnt eventually how to use doors and get out of doors locked by a chair propped against them.
THE WATER: This one is a biggy, and the main criticism of the movie: the fact that aliens get hurt by water. I do not think this is necessarily stupid. They might not have even experienced water until going to earth, and the movie never even theorises to where the aliens came from - they could have come from Mars, for all we know. It is the same story as War of the Worlds - no one is criticising War of the Worlds because aliens were defeated by viruses on earth - in fact people seem to applaud it. The aliens might not have encountered it yet, and when they did; they left the planet.
Why would aliens come to a planet just to eat us? Surely they have other sources of food on their own planet - or if they have such good technology could do so? The suggestion in the movie is that aliens are vegetarians, and it seems that their natural resources, or their farming land or something went wrong on their planet, and they came to ours. It also seems that they have been pushed into such dire straights they have to resort to killing humans. There is no comment to them NOT slaughtering animals for food - as they killed the dog in the movie, and could well have eaten it. It seems that they just want to survive, whether it means killing humans or not.
Why are they naked in the movie with no good technology for killing humans, or at least making them easier to eat? The aliens came from dire straights on their own planet so they could survive (supposedly) and if this were true, they might not have the technology at all, or available at this time for this kind of warfare - it might be new to them, or they could have left with non-or little of it. You have to remember that the film is just following the case of four people on a farm - who is to say other people in the world didn't run into more trouble.
I hope this shows how the movie, isn't completely silly, and that it is in fact a good film.
Thanks for reading.