How melting little green men helped Mel's make-good-with-God

Rating: 1/10 (6 September 2006)

This movie should be rated TB (for True Believers only). Sorry if I hurt a few feelings here, but frankly my atheist perception of this movie was it being an incredibly feeble, childish collection of wistful thoughts about divine power. The story sacrificed about everything that makes IMHO a watchable movie on the altar of this unique goal.
I guess a true believer will deem unimportant the blatant psychological inconsistencies riddling the script. I don't even feel like elaborating on the main character's struggles with faith: the lowest grade of basic emotional tricks you find in about half the movies shot since the invention of cinema, only very poorly used and with the subtlety of an elephant in a china store. Even the poor dog seems unable to maintain even a roughly credible behavior. His turning against the children must have been caused by alien poisoning - a metaphor for being possessed by the Demon, no doubt.
As we say in France, this movie is only preaching the already converted. Frankly, why go and fetch aliens to put forth the fact that having a child with a bad asthma and another obsessed with decorating the house with half-filled water glasses was all manifestations of divine wisdom? That seemed incredibly contrived, irrelevant, pointless. It left me wondering what pains the director went through to come up with something a major would buy:

hey guys, I got a script all about faith and predestination. We should win about 90% of the baptist audience with that. Plus all the clichés on the ideal white American family getting together to overcome the ordeals of life, that should grab a solid share of the corn- and bible belt. Not counting the Gibson right wing fan base. Now will you buy that?

not good enough

what if I throw in some aliens? What if they melt in water and spit poison from their wrists and get their fingers cut with cooking knifes, mmm?

Mmm... That should scrape enough little kids, X-files nostalgics and nerds plus a couple of UFO freaks to round the profit margin. OK, that's a deal!

Dear oh dear, what a world we are living in...
P.S: and just to prevent misunderstandings with the Shyamalan zealots, I got the "it was all just a dream" thing. Not an excuse to throw pretentious and inconsistent acting, plot and psychology in our faces for 2 hours.