I don't know how this is so popular!

Rating: 2/10 (20 July 2012)

For a film that is supposed to have been the thing that made Shyamalan what many describe as the next Spielburg, there are too many things wrong with this movie. The main points of interest being the Characters, the Story and worst of all, the fact that they actually state out loud why the movie is doomed to fail.
First off, lets start with the characters. They're all as bland as is humanly possible. Everyone seems to have a problem talking in this movie because they resort to whispering, even when the situation isn't tense enough to require it. Also, no one seems to have an emotion, they literally just say their lines. Mel Gibson seems to just monotonously deliver his lines, and don't get me started on Rory Culkin, who seems to have kept up his family tradition of blank, emotionless faces that seem to come naturally to them because no one else on earth could put on such a boring face even if they tried. Also, the children speak like adults and the adults speak like children. Whilst Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix discuss yelling and acting crazy to scare away the aliens, Rory Culkin is busy describing the fate of the future and the earth to his sister like he was some kind of Einstein trapped in a child's body. Children do not act like this in reality, rather than discussing what their kids might think of their current situation, they'd be running around waving their arms in the air panicking, if not they'd be thinking about what's on TV tonight.
Second of all, the story is rather inconsistent. It has Mel Gibson as the distraught father who lost his wife to a car accident and this is somehow woven into an alien invasion. However, the points at which they choose to reflect on Gibson's troubled past are so ridiculously timed. For example, whilst the alien is holding his son hostage, he decides to have a 5 minute flashback to when his wife died. As for myself, I'd be thinking of a way to get this alien off my son and kill it and leave the contemplation of my past to another day. The flashback scene of his wife dying would have had a more appropriate appearance say when he was lying awake in bed thinking of the past, like it does in most other films. Also there are many characters who say really odd lines which you may think are important who don't appear again, just 5 second cameos of people saying things that could be important to the situation, but they again just disappear.
And thirdly and most damningly, the fact that they state out loud why the film can't work. The planet is being invaded by a technologically superior race of aliens who have travelled light-years to get here, but they can't break through Pantry Doors! Whoever thought that up needs to be kicked for being so stupid! You can't be this idiotic! If the aliens had trouble working with doors, say they were allergic to wood or something, they would have built a device to help them overcome this problem, but nope, they came all this way just to have their grand invasion plan brought to a grinding halt by a wooden door!
Also, the aliens are harmed when they come into contact with water, it melts them. Well, perhaps they should have realised that critical point before they decided to invade a planet where 2/3s of its surface are covered in this harmful substance. The first rainstorm they come across (and if they've invaded the United Kingdom that's only minutes away), they'll be running down the drains in no time! You'd think also that they'd prepare for such an eventuality, like, oh I don't know, creating some protective suit or something so that they can't be harmed by the rain or any other water. But again, nope, they just came all this way with no preparation for this kind of situation, just so they could melt away into the gutter faster than they can say 'maybe we should have prepared for something like this...'
This movie has too many problems to count, the characters are bland cardboard puppets, the story is driving in reverse, the climax is ridiculously simplistic and they went and admitted the film's fatal flaw right to the audience. If no one else picked up on this obvious plot hole the size of the Grand Canyon, then I must be going slightly mad. Yes Shyamalan is a great director, especially in previous films like the Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, but those were psychological dramas rather than something more practical like an alien take over where a little more emotion and a little more practicality is involved. My advice to him is, go back to the stuff you were good at, the stuff that actually got you good reviews without having to butcher the whole plot and the film's feasibility whilst doing it.