Malt does more than Shyamalan to justify God's ways to man

Rating: Null/10 (9 October 2002)

Amazingly, SIGNS is worth seeing. Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan uses all his skill to tell his message-laden story with beauty, passion, humor, and spine-tingling suspense. I won't say that it doesn't matter that the story is absurd and that its message can't survive critical thought. It does matter, just not as much as I would have expected.
SIGNS' hero is Graham Hess, who lives on a beautiful farm in Pennsylvania with his brother and two young children. Graham is an ex-minister who lost the faith after his wife died. Now, strange things are happening all around him. He finds his crops flattened into odd geometric patterns; tame dogs inexplicably turn savage; mysterious visitors appear on his roof and then vanish. Then, similar events start happening all over the world. As the family realizes that these signs could portend the extinction of the human race, Graham faces the question of whether the God he forsook is controlling these events, or if instead he and his family are facing the impending apocalypse alone.
Shyamalan proved in THE SIXTH SENSE that he is a master of building tension, and that ability does not desert him in SIGNS. Shyamalan lets the audience know no more than the Hess family knows, so the viewers share the characters' dread and bewilderment. He also cunningly uses the tension generated by the bizarre phenomena going on around the Hesses to spark the tension between the characters themselves.
But (and hereafter there are some spoilers vaguely hinting at the ending), regrettably, all this skill goes to support Shyamalan's untenable thesis: that there are no coincidences. He is shilling for Alexander Pope's old nostrum: "All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee / All chance, direction, which thou canst not see / All discord, harmony not understood / All partial evil, universal good." Thus, SIGNS would have us believe, it is not really a random tragedy when a young mother dies in a freak accident, but rather it is God's secret way of saving her son by using her last words to spark a life-saving plan in her distraught husband's mind months later. Similar divine providence is suggested in a young boy's asthma and a little girl's fussiness about her water. Apparently it did not occur to Shyamalan that a God who was really pre-ordaining the world in mankind's best interest would have found a way of saving the son that did not include killing his mother or inventing a disease that kills thousands of youngsters annually. I could easily name five other "coincidences" that would have saved the boy's life just as effectively without using any grisly tragedies, and if I had the omniscience traditionally attributed to God I could probably think of a few more than that.
Nor is the vapid message SIGNS' only flaw. The movie also undermines the sense of menace by representing the hostile aliens as idiots. An advanced civilization that has conquered the barriers of interstellar travel is portrayed as behaving in such a manner that Stone Age barbarians could have beaten them off. Indeed, they are so ineffective that not until the movie is almost over is it clear that they are hostile at all. The aliens' weakness is a weapon that Earth obviously possesses in abundance, but the aliens don't take any precautions against it, not even the precautions that humans invented in their prehistory. The Hess family's defensive measures would not have discouraged a good Roman centurion and his men, but they are able to stop hypertechnological creatures cold. These absurdities don't just make the movie implausible, but also rob it of any lasting impact. You don't walk away from the theater shivering at what you have just seen; you walk away hoping that any interstellar invaders that may someday happen by our planet are as incompetent as the ones in the movie.
Was Mel Gibson good? Of course he was; you didn't need me to tell you that. All the other actors do well except Shyamalan himself; he takes on too large a role and delivers a flat, robotic performance. Unfortunately, that kind of acting is routinely praised as "understated" by people who forget that you can't "understate" something you didn't say to start with.
SIGNS is also surprisingly funny at times, and none of the jokes misses its target. A lazy writer would have written a cardboard buffoon into the script to provide comic relief; Shyamalan took the trouble to make each of his characters dramatic and comic by turns, and the movie is much better for it.
There is no getting around the fact that SIGNS is a failure. It's on a mission to convince its audience and will not do so; the only people nodding their heads will be those who were already convinced before they watched the film. But the movie is such a pretty, humorous, and tautly made failure that it's enjoyable anyway.
Rating: ** 1/2 out of ****
Recommendation: Watch on video or DVD on a slow night.