Breaks movie rule #1

Rating: 1/10 (30 July 2007)

Signs breaks movie rule #1: don't insult your audience.
Fantasy is great. Implausible is good. Outlandish is acceptable.
Signs is none of the three. It somehow manages to find its way into a fourth category - one that is so absolutely ridiculous that we question whether the writers were even awake.
It's stupid that Jeff Goldblum uploads a computer virus to the alien mainframe. It's stupid that viruses kill aliens who probably wouldn't have DNA at all.
But, you know what? Audiences aren't computer scientists (I am), and they don't know jack about how viruses (real or computer!) work. We accept that writers don't have technical knowledge and that they usually don't get it right (though we applaud them when they do).
Signs, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter.
Everyone who sees this movie knows how common water is on Earth. It comes out of the tap, falls from the sky, and covers 70% of the planet. It's in rivers, lakes, and in every living thing on our planet. Kids play with blasters designed to shoot it and balloons designed to hold it. We have pools of it to swim in. It's sold in bottles in every food store, convenience store, drugstore, and pretty much any other kind of store you can think of.
So, considering that you could hardly choose something more universal, WHY would the writers of Signs decide to make the aliens vulnerable to water? They know how universal it is. They know how absolutely ABSURD such a plot point is, and they know that their audience will know it.
Yet they proceeded anyway. Perhaps they were trying to push the limits of what their audience would accept. Perhaps this is some kind of silly joke. But whatever the reason, their choice was not a lack of understanding. Their choice to make the aliens vulnerable to water was not a mistake and not an oversight. It was a deliberate choice.
It's a slap in the face. A big "screw you" for trying to believe that this movie in any way represents any sort of reality. Not just the reality we live in, but any reality whatsoever. Movies don't have to be consistent with the world we live in, but they do have to be consistent with themselves.
I am vocal about my distaste for movies that insult me. Flightplan sucks because it breaks the barrier of plausibility. But as bad as Flightplan is, Signs is 1000 times worse. From beginning to end, this movie just doesn't fit together.
Signs doesn't break with plausibility to advance the plot. There is no tongue-in-cheek "OK, this is absurd" like Austin Powers or Spaceballs. It's not funny, it's not artsy, and it's not smart. Signs breaks with plausibility simply because the writers thought they could get away with it. I, like many others on IMDb, have responded with an empathetic "NO". You can't just jerk me around for your own amusement. Write a movie that holds together or I will go watch one of the numerous other pictures that do.