Yes, it's scary. Yes, it's effective. But...

Rating: Null/10 (25 September 2002)

SPOILERS... M. Night Shyamalan's new movie is, apparently, according to the promotional material plastered over every wall, bus and poster site in town, about crop circles. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when, upon finally seeing this movie, it turned out to be about a priest who has lost his faith, and eventually gets it back. It is also about the priest's brother, who could have been a great baseball player, but never quite managed it. It is also about the priest's kids, who have dreams, and who refuse to drink tap water cos it's "contaminayyydid". Oh, and there are some crop circles and some aliens who hover over our major cities (See Woody Allen's "The UFO Menace" for a possible explanation of why aliens like to hover) for a while. Confused? You will be. You will think that you have seen nine tenths of an utterly superb and gripping movie, with one tenth of an eminently silly and preposterous Hollywood slop-fest. M. Night (as we in the know call him) knows how to make a great movie. Many scenes, even (especially) the most innocuous ones, crackle with menace and tension. Characters appear from behind other characters' backs, the camera pans to reveal that people are in the room when a scene has been going on for ages without them, objects loom in the foreground and move to reveal events in the middle distance (there's a great shot that starts with two dogs going left and right, to reveal the crop circle). He's learned a great deal from Spielberg and from Hitchcock (check out the great opening titles and music) - two pretty good people to try and learn from, you must agree. He knows that less is more. The aliens are only glimpsed, which makes them much more scary - a leg here, a hand there, a chopped-off finger over there in the corner, by the door... Perhaps the most awe-inspiringly brilliant and spine-tingling scene is the one in which we see the alien for the first time, in amateur video footage from Brazil (I think) showing kids at a birthday party running from one window to the other, shrieking with delighted terror, with the camera craning over them to try to see, and then, suddenly, when we think we can't stand it any more, there is a crash of discordant music on the soundtrack, and there it is, walking across the alley in a split second, staring at the camera. Brilliant. I'm getting goose-bumps right now, just thinking about it. Which makes the rest of this review all the more difficult to write, because the rest of the film is, well, a bit crap. Mel and the family barricade themselves in the house (why?) and the aliens attack, pausing long enough to allow Mel to tell both his kids a heart-warming story about when they were born (I'm not making this up). Aliens attack. Brother wacks alien with baseball bat. Water kills alien. Aliens bugger off. It's a Mini adventure. Mel's faith is restored. Great, if you're a religious person, I suppose. But for an atheist like me, this ain't no happy ending, man. And for a science-fiction/horror buff, it's not up to much either. Why have these aliens come to a planet covered in water, with water in the very air they must be breathing, only to find out, after several days, that water kills them? Did I miss something? Is that it? Spurious references to the Middle East don't wash, either. What M. needs to do, and quickly, is make a film from someone else's script, otherwise he's going to end up with a CV crammed with intelligent, gripping but ultimately disappointing thrillers, oh, and "The Sixth Sense" (which was pretty well perfect, wasn't it?). "Signs" is pretty damn good, for most of its running-time, but the last few minutes will leave you wanting something more, and something less.