Total crap, an utter waste of time. The surface action is dumb and the deeper message is dumber.

Rating: 1/10 (27 April 2009)

SPOILER ALERT Many reviewers here complained about the ridiculous plot holes and I agree. It's full of holes.
I see a lot of movies and I will walk if it looks lousy. There's 20+ movies to choose from, why waste time on a lousy one? If I hear lame dialog, a trite or cliché script, if I roll my eyes more than twice, I'm outta there. If the writer and director are lousy, they're not going to get any better. An exception to this is when they hire another writer or director after firing the lame one. An example of this is "The Muppets Take Manhattan," where the first half is lousy, but the second half is good and even great in some parts.
I walked on "Signs" after about 40 minutes and didn't look back. However, a family member insisted that it was good and all came together in the end, so I went back and watched the entire movie, start to end. Boy was I sorry, I should have stayed away.
The movie is ridiculous on various levels, but besides that, it has nothing worthwhile to offer.
As soon as the aliens came into the story, I was able to accurately predict the entire story: Aliens may or may not be here. As the movie progresses, the evidence of the aliens becomes more pronounced until we begin to see glimpses of them. From there we will go into the climax where we have a showdown with the aliens and win. That's a synopsis of the plot and who, I mean who, is going to say there is anything at all original about that? No one over the age of 13.
The movie plays out just as I predicted. But there's some quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo thrown in there that's really the point of the story. Fine, the only problem is that the mumbo-jumbo is so utterly ridiculous that it's laughable.
Unless I'm missing something (unlikely), the plot is this: God causes Gibson's wife to get horribly injured in an accident where she suffers in agony until Gibson can get there, whereupon she delivers a coded message from God to Gibson, without Gibson realizing it, and then she dies. This accident causes Gibson to lose his faith in God. Meanwhile, God has caused another family member that is a budding baseball star to suffer an injury and his career and life are ruined. Then, God causes the kid to have an irrational preoccupation with water, resulting in half glasses of water being left all over the house. Then, God causes all these circumstances to work together during an alien invasion of earth such that the coded message, the water, and the sports career work together to defeat the aliens in the house and save lives. Gibson sees how God has wrought all of this and regains his faith. If that's it, that's the most utterly ridiculous, blasphemous, lame, contrived, etc story I've ever heard of.
So I'm wondering two things: 1: Is my understanding of the story complete and my laughter is justified, or did I miss something? And 2: How on earth did the guy that wrote the brilliant "The 6th Sense" write this load of tripe? It would seem that his contract with the movie studio includes a "right of subcontract" and he subcontracted his swimming pool cleaning guy to write this.