Prepare Yourself- for the biggest disappointment of the year.

Rating: 1/10 (2 August 2002)

*BIG SPOILERS*
I just returned from the theater where this was screened at a matinee showing. I went early- with all the hype, the theater was sure to be packed.
Right. If you call 12 people "packed."
I paid $5.75 to see this movie.
I paid WAY too much.
The acting from the entire cast was among the most overblown I've ever seen- the performances were laughably stilted and the dialogue is so wooden that it could have been cut with a chainsaw and sold by the board-foot. There ARE some very tense, even scary parts to the film, primarily a segment involving the invasion of a farm family's domicile by hostile Aliens. Otherwise, this mess was a complete waste.
Apparently whoever wrote this thing has never worked with exposition before. Instead of letting the audience in on important facts about the aliens a little at a time, we have a precocious, obnoxious brat (played to perfection by Rory Culkin) who spews information about the aliens until you begin to think that he might be one of them. Of course, you quickly realize that that's ridiculous, just like the film itself.
The lynchpin of the movie was that there are no coincidences, that everything is apparently planned by some Higher Power and NOTHING is random. If you know ANYTHING about probability theory and statistics, you know that this is utter rubbish. I won't even waste time on the hoaxes involving crop circles. Use your search engine and you'll find out where they came from.
Moreover, the film lifts its basic plot from George Pal's classic 1952 film, "The War of the Worlds." In both movies, the evil alien invaders are wiped slick by things that are generally so common that we don't think twice about them- disease bacteria in WOTW, plain old H2O in this flick. WOTW ends with a shot of a church still standing in the ruined landscape of Los Angeles while a choir hymns on the soundtrack; SIGNS ends with our protagonist, a former clergyman who had lost his faith, putting on his clerical collar once again. Actually, I think that this is also an attempt to hijack some of the Apocalyptic Doomsday success from the "Left Behind" book series.
Please don't waste your time and money on this. If you must see it, wait for the VHS/DVD releases. They'll be coming out very soon. I predict that this thing will bomb, and that's the only way the film makers will see their investment returned.