MANIPULATIVE, EMPTY, PRETENTIOUS. In otherwords, IT STINKS.

Rating: 3/10 (2 August 2002)

I for one am very tired of being manipulated by M. Night Shyamalan, and offered movies with pretentious messages and warped little twists. "Signs" is similar to "Unbreakable" in that style, and this is a real disappointment.
In the trailers and ads we are shamelessly deceived into thinking this is about aliens and will be real scary. It is really about some corny internal spiritual journey the main character (Gibson) takes after his wife's death in a car crash. What the message is remains unclear; supposedly it is about "faith", those who have it and those who don't. But the dopey end seems to mock Christian beliefs, leaving us with an entirely empty message with no point or reolution.
Shyamalan uses film school tricks and ideas lifted from various other movies to build the tension, while trying to get us to emotionally "bond" with the farm family being visited by aliens. This direction is so obvious I sat there analyzing it more than feeling it.
At the end what have we? A dead alien who is more than a mere alien, a baseball bat, water phobia, and no discernible resolution on the matter of faith and The Great Beyond. What the alien really is up to struck me as ridiculous for various reasons.
WAIT FOR THE DVD.