Tapped into so much, another totally awesome Shyamalan film! The most scared i've ever been during a movie.

Rating: Null/10 (17 August 2002)

Ok, i've long since reached that point in my life when "horror movies" don't have a hope of scaring me. And no, i wouldn't call "Signs" a horror movie. But it *actually scared me*.
Many said they weren't scared at all, strangely enough some people seriously recommended "The Exorcist" as a scary alternative to "Signs" - imo "The Exorcist" is about as scary as losing a sock in the wash! I thought that was a *drama* movie... So maybe different things are fundamentally frightening to different people, and "Signs" just tapped straight into my personal little fear-verse.
Just let me say that he draws fear from the simplest most fundamental places. I've never seen a movie actually capture that. You know how horror movies seem to try and *create* a scary scene? I get the impression that Shyamalan didn't try and *create* scary moments, he looked at things from real life - things you think about when you're thirteen years old, huddled in fear under the covers of your bed reading a book about UFO sightings - he took *those* things and drew fear from them. And they aren't anything like horror movie scenes - because they're actually scary.
As others have said, there's more to it than that. I won't go so far as to say "this wasn't a movie about aliens", because it obviously was. It just wasn't ONLY about aliens. I feel that it was a movie about everyday things, but it was also a movie about fear. We saw a range of different sources of fear (two or three of the scariest moments, if i had to pick "scariest moments" out of a film that was so consistently succesful at keeping me on edge and involved, didn't nessecarily involve anything extraterrestrial!). It made me think about the fears portrayed in the film, and where they come from. I think i could say it made me feel like a little child.
CRITICISM:
I'd like to critisize some of the criticism for the movie - unfortunately that involves referring to spoilers, and its a sin to spoil a Shyamalan movie, so here's fair warning - the next section is intended for the perusal of those who have already seen the film:
IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT, DONT YOU DARE READ AHEAD!! YOU'LL REGRET IT!! FAIR WARNING!!!!!
SPOILER SECTION:
*
************************************************
Various people around the world have critisized the science of it. But they're wrong. I am a huge Biology geek. I LOVE critisizing the idiot things that moronic Hollywood scriptwriters do. I LOVE nitpicking the wannabe-science of movies.
But this movie was Solid. Some of the best SF i've seen. And the 'scientific' criticisms of it don't hold water.
"Why would those aliens come to a planet whose surface is three-quarters water?"
They didn't land in the ocean!! Do human explorers look at an island and say "Ooh, look, a volcano. Potentially dangerous, better not go there at all"? Of course not! Sheesh.
Even if they had wanted to land in the ocean, the ocean is saltwater. Earth's surface is 75% water, but only 2% freshwater - and most of that is polar. Saltwater is a VERY different thing to freshwater, as any physiology student (or fan of the supernatural, come to think of it...) will tell you!! Furthermore, they could easily have come from a planet that was mostly seawater - in fact, they most likely did. How? Read on.
"Why would those aliens attack humans, who are 80% water?"
We aren't freshwater either. The water in the human body is chock full of solutes. We might drink freshwater, but the second we absorb it we dissolve our chemical systems in it and it becomes highly concentrated salty stuff. It's a very different kind of water.
"How did they get through the icy Kuiper Belt?"
They had spaceships. Thats also how they managed to get through space, by the way. And furthermore, they needn't have gone through the Kuiper Belt anyway! The Kuiper Belt is a Belt, not a Sphere!! It doesn't surround the solar system, only the solar plane. You've gotta think three-dimensionally when it comes to outer space.
"How could an animal like that evolve? Water is the basis of life!"
Uh huh. And what happens when you feed saltwater to a freshwater animal? Those aliens could easily have been 80% water, just like us, and it wouldn't create ANY plot holes. Like i said before, the water in your body is more like seawater than freshwater. The idea of an animal that is killed by freshwater is quite plausible. In fact, i'm sure some Earthling examples actually exist. If i had to guess, i'd say that these guys evolved in saltwater, but never adapted to freshwater for basic chemical reasons. The rivers and lakes of their world are probably to them what lava flows are to us. They probably instruct their children to stay away from river deltas when swimming by the shoreline in the same way that we instruct our children to stay away from rip tides.
The next criticism is a philosophical one.
"Wasn't it insulting to atheists?"
I'm an atheist, and i wasn't the least bit offended. One has to understand when seeing a movie that the character on the screen is not supposed to be YOU. I don't look anything like Mel Gibson, so it wasn't too hard for be to be unoffended by what felt right to him. The guy wasn't a real atheist to begin with. He didnt make some miraculous conversion during the course of the film, he only returned to what he knew. He found an alternate way of looking at things that had turned him away from religion, and, in the context of the film, a perfectly valid way of looking at things. And definitely not one that was specifically Christian, in case anyone suspected otherwise.
******************************************
*
*
SPOILERS OVER!! (DON'T SCROLL UPWARDS!)
I loved this movie! See it, revel in it, let yourselves be dragged into it.
And celebrate!! Never again will i watch a typical BS horror movie and think "It's so depressing that this un-scary stuff is all that directors seem to be capable of".