Good but with big plot holes.

Rating: 5/10 (14 January 2003)

Signs is a good movie, and I enjoyed it. But it had flaws. I really think there are two separate points that bother most people.
The first is the way the film deals with faith and predestination. The film takes the beliefs of many Christian groups about predestination to their logical conclusion.
The second bigger problem is due to the incredibly bizarre behavior and nature of the aliens, and the very strange reaction of the humans to the invasion.
***Spoilers ahead***
Suspension of disbelief only goes so far. Some things need an explanation or they ruin the entire movie. Yes, I know Signs wasn't really about aliens. But that doesn't mean that the aliens shouldn't make some kind of sense. I'm also willing to ignore things like the baby monitor that picks up space aliens and the book on aliens that is way too accurate. Those are minor things. I'll even overlook how a small boy manages to calmly kill a large enraged dog with a fork. But, some things were just too major to overlook.

The aliens were burned and injured by water. That's possible I guess. As I remember it, we are immune to water because proteins don't dissolve readily in water. But it might be possible for life to be based on a substance that did dissolve in water, like sugars or something.
But an alien like that wouldn't just go walking around on Earth naked. Even humidity would hurt them. One rainstorm and they would melt away. They would last about as long as a naked human would in the sulfuric acid atmosphere of Venus.
Water is very common in the universe, very common. There's no way that any alien species wouldn't realize water was harmful to them. It would be like humans not knowing about ammonia or methane.
The aliens crossed thousands of light years and they can't even manage to break into an isolated farmhouse? They didn't have a disintegrator ray gun or even a crowbar? They couldn't find a crowbar? They don't know how to start a fire? Nothing the aliens did in any way exhibited intelligence beyond that of chimpanzees.
They just came to Earth, made a few crop circles, harassed people for a bit, then started kidnapping people. All of it seems very, very, implausible and this is from someone that has already accepted for the sake of the movie that there are freaking aliens running around on Earth.
I guess I could explain it by speculating that the aliens we saw weren't intelligent and were instead a semi intelligent species that was transported to Earth by the intelligent alien species.
But Earth has nothing a star traveling species needs. There are thousands of cubic miles of metal rich rock floating around in space. Water is also very plentiful in space too, not that these aliens need water. The only thing on earth that can't be found in space is life. But what good would this be to Aliens, except in a zoo. OK, so maybe the alien plan was to capture humans and put us in a zoo.
I'm really having to stretch here. So far we have sugar based aliens that send their semi intelligent slaves to capture humans for zoo animals. I guess that works. The crop circles might have been something to mark pickup areas to the semi intelligent aliens or something.
But the real question is, why didn't the family have a gun? That was a rural are where nearly everyone has a few firearms. Even if they didn't have guns in the house they would have managed to get one from somewhere when the problems started. They didn't even have a good pitchfork or axe to fight with.
There's no rational explanation for that.
I've always thought that people go to ridiculous extremes to explain things like crop circles, which are obviously man made. Perhaps the intent of this movie was to show how absurd some of those beliefs are. On that level it worked very well.
Other than that though, I thought Signs was pretty good.