Well.... what can you say!?

Rating: 3/10 (10 February 2003)

Quite a lot has already been said about this movie already. Certainly, if its director/writer wanted to cause a stir of mixed opinion then he succeeded.
Spoilers Ahead.
Me? Well I went from being highly impressed with scenes such as when
Joaquin Phoenix sees the alien in Rio, the reaction being so good you jump with him. Then we have the sheer horror as he replays the clip. Such a memorable scene and this marked the down hill point of the film for me.
Then we go over to the sheer insanity of the 'plot hole circumventor' UFO book that explains the alien ray-gun ban so 'mankind won't use nuclear weapons'.
Why bother? Given my next points..
But most amusing of all is the fact that aliens with such an aversion to water seem to pick on a planet whose surface is 4/5s water and whose 'food source' is 70-80% water. Which also caused me some concern of the alien picking Rio in the first place. It's probably one the most humid places on the planet.
Oh, but while we're on the subject, lets not forget the susceptibility to large twigs.
You can imagine the scene on the mother ship. "We've taken over the entire Earth beloved leader" Shortly followed by "Hold on!! Oh, my god! Look out he's got a piece of wood! Run for you're lives!'
And would that ancient 'Arabian' or 'Eastern' attack method be smacking the scrawny sods with a bit of 2 by 4? One can only guess.
I think I laughed through the last 10 minutes of the film (much to everyone's annoyance) as these thoughts and more went through my mind.
I'm sure if I watched it again I would pickup the merit points. After all, there are so many good parts to the film in the opening parts. Plus the fact it didn't turn into 'Independence Day' was a bonus I feel. After all, this was a story about a family, about loosing (and then regaining) faith. I guess what it really is about is 'about time M. Night Shyamalan stopped taping 'shock endings' onto the end of his films. What did Hitchcock once say?
"I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach."