signs of spoilers

Rating: 7/10 (4 August 2002)

I have enjoyed all the work that M.Night Shayalaman has produced, but I have often wondered; how many original ideas can one person produce? The Sixth Sense was completely new; I loved Unbreakable but its impact was understated,but it also had an action hero cast as an action hero, but Signs was not quite the same. The main thing that it had difficulty with was the dramatic casting of Mel Gibson in a movie almost completely free of action sequences as we have come to expect them from hollywood. Night created a film, that while dressed lightly in the trappings of science fiction, and definitely suspenseful, was an emotionally centered personal drama. On this level, it was very good, and its focus on the sensation of impending doom was much more satisfying than pleny of films that removed the threat from our imagination and slammed it on the screen head on instead. He made use of a lot of referential imagery. Repeatedly, we would se Mel's character, the formerly Reverend Graham Hess being framed in a doorway with the shadow lines of an absent cross on one wall, signifying his loss of faith, and behind him, a stained glass window with an eye-of-God motif, which I suppose indicated the continuing presence of that which Hess was denying. With Gibson as the lead, it took a while to realize that this was a movie without any kind of action hero, unless you considered Joaquin Pheonix's cowering, insecure ball player. Seriously, the anti-esp helmets made them look like hersey's kisses.
spoilers(moreso)
When they decided to board up the house against the monstrous menace, clawed, greenskinned and hungering to consume their flesh, the sequence was a direct lift from Romero's Night of the Living Dead, complete with a final retreat into the poorly secured basement. As a fan of that film, I appreciated the reference, as a means of applying context to the level of fear. Of course, the relative toughness of the foe was more severe, because a thump in the head was sufficient for the zombies, but it took the world's hardest batter about a dozen swings, enough to break the bat, and all the leftover's the precognitive little girl could gather about the house to do in the baddie.