OVER-RATED!!! OVER-RATED!!!

Rating: 2/10 (6 February 2004)

10 things I hate about Signs: **SPOILERS**
1. Shameless Hitchcockian/Psycho opening music and credits rip-off.

2. Casting: Hiring 46-year-old Mel Gibson and 28-year-old Joaquin Phoenix to play brothers.
3. Acting: Everyone said their lines like they were reading them off a teleprompter. Mel Gibson never changed his facial expression once during the entire film.
3a. Small thing: If you want to build mystery about a character, don't cast the director of the film as that character. The audience will forget immediately that he is supposed to be mysterious and instead will say, 'Hey, that's the director!'
4. Crop Circles are not inherently scary. You can't just establish that crop circles are scary without establishing why they're scary. The film opens with Mel Gibson discovering a crop circle in his yard. He is instantly frightened for the safety of his family, which is practically laughable. If some farmer woke up to find his crops ruined, I don't think he would be frightened. He would probably go and get his shotgun an' hunt down the sum' bitch who did it.
4a. When one of the characters writes off the crop circles by saying it was discovered to be a hoax by some of British guys a few years back, you instantly negate your entire movie. Unless M. Nught purposely wants us to believe that two random dorks coincidentally guessed an alien language while playing their practical joke.
5. Not one but TWO painfully long speeches by Mel describing how his children were born.
6. Tired "My child has asthma" plot device, AND tired "little kid happens to be standing next to the only opening in a locked room while monsters are trying to attack them, so one of them can reach in and grab him" plot device, BACK TO BACK!
7. Joaquin Phoenix plays an ex-baseball player who couldn't make it to the pros because he struck out a lot, even though he could hit the ball over 500 feet!!! Um, probably not.
8. When a kid thinks there's a monster standing outside their window, they don't tell their parents in a monotone voice. It's usually more of a blood-curdling scream.
9. Hearing a jarbled cell phone conversation over a baby monitor and thinking it's two aliens talking.not scary.
10. Retarded scene with alien walking through kid's birthday party. Why would the aliens jeopardize their entire mission so one of them could walk through a crowded birthday party in the middle of the day? Is he a big fan of cake? Did he want a crack at the piñata?
Bonus #11 (big spoiler)
11. The aliens' weakness is.(drum roll).WATER! It's like acid. It burns their skin. Sound clever? The answer is no, and let me tell you why. If the aliens are killed by water, how is it that they can walk around on Earth? The air on earth HAS WATER IN IT!!! It's what makes the sky blue. We measure it with something called HUMIDITY!!! Why would aliens come to a planet comprised mostly of water to harvest humans who are ninety percent water? It's a plot hole so big, you could fit Rosie O'Donnell through it.

Ironic because M. Night Shyamalamadingdong got his start directing a Rosie O'Donnell movie.