Mystery, menace, and significance

Rating: Null/10 (13 September 2002)

"Signs" is typical Shyamalan: moody, spooky, deliberately paced, with an action star (Mel Gibson this time, instead of Bruce Willis) in a non-action role. Having taken on the ghost story in "The Sixth Sense," and (less successfully) the superhero saga in "Unbreakable," the writer/director now takes on the alien invasion flick. As usual, he approaches the subject on more than one level: the title has to do with a lot more than just circles in a cornfield.
Good thing, too, since the connection between the crop circles and the aliens is so tenuous, almost incidental, that the circles might have been dispensed with altogether. In real life, crop circles have yet to be explained; claims by certain people to have created them as a hoax have themselves been exposed as hoaxes. Gratuitously concluding that they must be connected to aliens is rather a lowest-common-denominator "explanation." Given the mystery surrounding crop circles, I'd have to say that the definitive movie about them has yet to be made.
That having been said, "Signs" has to be the lowest-key alien invasion flick ever, the very antithesis of "Independence Day": there are almost no UFO effects to speak of (just the static shots the characters see on TV), no zap guns, no apocalyptic scenes of mass destruction; the invasion comes and goes overnight, like a bad dream, as our protagonists hide in a basement. Only one of the invading alien horde is ever seen, as a shadowy, low-tech, man-in-an-alien-costume presence. With its small cast, its few locations, its lack of CGI, and its absence of spectacular ambition, "Signs" could've been made for a shoestring (if not for Mel's paycheck). With its championing of the old-fashioned values of family, faith, recovery from loss, and a good baseball swing, "Signs" could've been made in the '50s. For those of us who love the old "Keep Watching the Skies" SF flicks, that's not a bad thing.