Come on, everyone, get real

Rating: Null/10 (20 August 2002)

[Yeah, there are spoilers. Many.]
This film is far from the cinematic watershed many blindly proclaim. In fact, it's a mess, quite silly, and in so many ways derivative. Think "Night of the Living Dead," "Independence Day," and all the hints of coming mediocrity that Shyamalan gave us in his two previous films -- The Sixth Sense, which I thought was a great film, and Unbreakable, which began to hint at his talent for making the banal overly self-indulgent and pretentious. This film leads us further down that road.
Sure it's well done. Cinematography effective. And in the beginning scenes you begin to think there's going to be a Sixth Sense treat in store. The little girl's a scene stealer. The early emotions alluring if predictable. But this film never delivers, and instead goes from silly to ridiculous. Come on, it really IS just an alien invasion flick, and laughably. I mean where do we come off fantasizing that an alien intelligence that is prima facie so far advanced over any technological level we can claim, has as its loftiest purposes, hiding in cornfields, signalling with crop circles, running around looking like George Pal's Morlocks on a strict diet. Hey guys, get in there and eat a few more humans! You can navigate through space but you need a symbol in a cornfield to tell you where to land, be, or whatever. When a human raises a bat in retaliation, blast that sucker out of existence with a hand phaser before he gets to strike two. And if a little moisture is going to spell your doom, don't choose a planet that's two-thirds water. And if you're going to spend years planning this invasion with surreptitious abductions, then just take those few specimens you need and breed the crap out of them in holding pens on your ships for soylent green.
And if all that Mel Gibson needs to overcome the loss of his faith due to his wife's demise is the trivial epiphany "see ... then swing away," then we've really reached the nadir of human self-indulgence. And all we need to do to thwart the alien invasion is lock them in a closet, or spit at them? Dorothy did it better and more convincingly in Oz.
You want "spiritual enlightenment and redemption" without having your brains batted out by it, see Contact, or go back and see 2001. But don't see this mess of a movie. Shyamalan needs to abandon the maudlin and macabre and make a comedy or two. This movie sure made me laugh.