Signal Failure 2/10

Rating: 1/10 (2 April 2003)

WARNING: SPOILERS THROUGHOUT

An ambitious attempt to rework the traditional scifi theme of alien invasion into something more cerebral comes a cropper amidst the crop circles of a movie as over stylised as it is over wrought. The plot, centering upon a man of God who has lost his faith and must now regain it on a long night's journey of the soul, isn't new: Hollywood has essayed it in every imaginable genre, whilst Spielberg was at his eloquent best in the examinations of faith and obsession that underpinned Close Encounters'.

Signs' is in similar territory, and has an equally talented creative force behind it in the person of M. Night Shyamalan, the conjurer whose Sixth Sense' remains one of cinema's finest party pieces: daring in its contrivance, accomplished in its execution. After that though, Unbreakable' broke into a million pieces of disbelief, and now Signs' fails in every area where Sixth Sense' so brilliantly triumphed.
Artifice and contrivance, so cunningly masked in Sixth Sense', are here all too embarrassingly obvious, helped in no way by the script's blatant defensiveness Gibson's remark about aliens unable to get out from behind pantry doors reeks less of humor as a narrative awareness that somehow, in some way, this script has to be rescued, and fast. The line is used to shore up the absurd proposition that a family living next to an alien landing site will therefore decide to remain in their house / basement rather than head for the hills  or, in this case, the safety of water, an element apparently injurious to aliens yet the presence of which upon our Earth is so visible as to make it appear blue from outer space. But perhaps in addition to a propensity for incarceration in cupboards, these aliens are myopic as well.
In a role which requires him to be more alienated than any alien, Gibson displays a gamut of emotions that span the gap from A to B but leave the remainder of the alphabet untouched. This is not entirely his fault, as under-playing is here a case of permanent diminuendo: the central characters verge on near total eclipse from the very first scene, and do nothing to light up the screen thereafter. Embarrassment for all concerned turns to excruciation in the revelatory sequence explaining why Gibson has lost his faith: the dying wife scene mixes implausibility with risibility in so inept a fashion it's astonishing it was never left behind in the editing suite.
Devoid of the visual flourishes that hallmarked Sixth Sense', and saddled with characters amongst the most unsympathetic ever to have been menaced by anyone/anything  ye Gods, they even leave their pet dog outside to be eaten by aliens, and then never remark on it --`Signs' is 100% clunker from beginning to end. That it comes from a 100% unique talent is all the more tragic. Mr Shyamalan has already shown himself to be one of the cinema's finest illusionists; here's hoping he can rid himself of the compunction to embrace big themes' (and a tonnage of sentiment) and get back to what he obviously does best: technical tour de forces of brilliant misdirection. Hitchcock's crown still awaits. . . Rating: 2/10.