So much potential...

Rating: 6/10 (11 August 2002)

SMALL SPOILERS CONTAINED WITHIN.
Unfortunately, no matter how rosey your glasses are, Signs is your basic "rediscover your faith" movie that has been done to death over the years, this time thinly veiled as a sci-fi thriller. Even worse, it was obvious this was going to be the case right from the "there are two kinds of people" monologue about 30 minutes into the movie.
Don't get me wrong, at the end of the day I did enjoy this movie - it had some nice humour, good suspense and (if you ignore the spiritual stuff) a reasonably good plot. I particularly liked the way you (the viewer) knows no more about what's going on than the rest of the characters - the deliberate lack of the usual "eye-of-god" viewpoint was refreshing.
The sad thing is that at the end of the day this was a very shallow and predictable movie from quite early in the piece (although that being said, the marketing revealed very little of what the movie was really about - reminds me a bit of "Dangerous Minds" in that regard ;) ). A typical "along for the ride" type fiasco where you don't actually have to any thinking for yourself - unfortunately all too prominent in Hollywood. I personally don't like having all the details laid out for me, but it appears that I'm in the minority. Interestingly, this reason was exactly why I liked The Sixth Sense so much, but it was obviously wrong of me to expect more of the same.
I said above that the suspense was good, but I did feel it was overdone - A bit of a one trick pony really - the only really effective and (vaguely) original use was the scene near the end where the (presumably two) aliens were stomping around outside - *very* good use of the surround sound too! I agree with a lot of the previous posts that the "amature video" scene, while being 'scary', actually took a lot away from the intensity of the film - fear is largely based on the unknown, yada yada.
One interesting point, on a personal note, is that this movie did make me feel a bit uncomfortable. I was thinking about this, and came up with the following conclusion: because I believe that it would be very arrogant of us to think that we are alone in the universe, this scenario, while not probable, is (IMHO) quite possible. The basic level of fear was quite effectively communicated in several scenes (ah, so much potential, Mr. Shyamalan!) and this in turn translated into quite a primal feeling within myself. So much so that I found myself checking nervously over my shoulder while sitting reading these posts at about midnight after seeing the movie. AH! you say - that was the point of the movie... unfortunately, not so - please refer to first paragraph. However, it does hint at the talent of this particular director, not seen since The Sixth Sense.
There was so much promise in the opening minutes of this film, including good development and some excellent screenplaying, all ultimately betrayed by the "human" element. A solid 6 out of 10.
Aidan