Shyamalan's 1st Grade Writing Project.

Rating: 2/10 (14 August 2002)

First off, there will be SPOILERS in this.
I'm going to use a sort of rating system that I haven't quite seen yet. 1-10, though.
PLOT: (3) Aliens. Oh no! Wait a minute, that really has nothing to do with the story. This story is about Gibson's character finding God... again. When I saw the previews to this, and even in the first half hour of this movie, that isn't what I was expecting to see.
MUSIC: (2) The theme song, which was pretty much all the music, sets the mood with scary string music, but then goes into some upbeat garbage that really upset me the 5th time they used it.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: (0) Where I have the most quarrels. The ONLY character development was on the part of Gibson's character. All other characters could have been replaced by almost completely different people. The brother could have been a boxer, a lumberjack, a gymnast, most anything. See the axe on the wall, swing. See the picture of you as a boxer on the wall, swing. See the pipe on the ceiling, swing. The son could have been much older, a female, a friend, as long as he had asthma. And, as an asthma sufferer myself, I find it sad that a father would force his seemingly bad asthmatic child to live on a farm. The daughter could have been anyone who didn't like the taste of country tapwater. Who does, anyway? I don't even want to know why Shyamalan decided to appear as a bad actor.
CONCLUSION: (0) Wow. Pretty much what Shyamalan did was give himself a memo that said "Write a movie with a lot of build up, anticlimax, lots of stars, where there's a sick boy, a washed up athlete and a disbelieving priest," and then he saw an episode (bad episode) of the X-Files. What he did in the 6th sense was great. He started with a theme and built FROM it. In this case, he built AROUND it. FOR it. It was really sad to watch. The aliens (which I've barely mentioned) were explained in less than 2 minutes of dialogue, and that goes for the appearance and disappearance of them. To think that aliens allergic to water would come to EARTH, a planet that would probably in reality have enough water vapor in the air to harm the aliens, to harvest people made mostly of WATER, only to run away because they'd been attacked with (what we assume the rest were attacked with at least)..... water. The idea that we can fend off aliens with waterguns just made me want to cry.
Terrible movie. I'm beginning to think Unbreakable was better than this...