Stop Signs?

Rating: 2/10 (12 April 2005)

After Shyamalan's excellent work on "Sixth Sense," I was really looking forward to Signs. Unfortunately, Signs never lived up to its hype and, certainly, not to its heritage.
This movie was the worst of Independence Day, (the way the aliens communicated), Night of the Living Dead, (boarding themselves up in to the basement), and The Wizard of Oz, (kill the aliens by throwing water on them? "Help me, I'm melting...), all rolled into one. The plot was completely predictable. The characters were not to be believed. The movie was made up of pieces of other, better films, assembled in a haphazard manner. The subplot concerning Hess' dead wife was pointless, what did his wife's death have to do with aliens from outer space? It amounted to 106 minutes of spooky sounding music that was supposed to increase the tension for the climax. Unfortunately, what was going to happen in the end was so predictable right from the start, it just ended up being 90 minutes of boring and 16 minutes of bad special effects.
The tag line, "It's not like they didn't warn us," says it all. Anyone who didn't get that the aliens were coming would have to have been deaf and blind. The constant references to water gave away the climax long before the aliens got there. The movie was set in Pennsylvania, not Siberia, was it really necessary to hide in the basement? Why didn't they just call someone, it's not like they were all alone. The problem is, I wish someone had warned me about how bad this movie really was, so I could have saved my $7.00.