Pretty Good Movie

Rating: 8/10 (4 August 2002)

I enjoyed "Signs" for the most part. It reminded me of what "The Blair Witch Project" tried to do, except this movie did a better job at reaching that goal. I don't think "Signs" was all that expensive to make -- the story did not require any special effects or major sets -- so it is a great example of a fairly inexpensive movie that succeeds due to good writing, acting, camera work, and direction. I liked how it told a story of an event that involved billions of people, yet did so by focusing only on a few people and showing how a major world event affected them personally.

It is not a film that needs to be seen on the big screen, though. It would play just as well as a rental, and it might even work better as a film you watch with one or two others in a dark house as opposed to watching it with one or two hundred others in a theatre. The "twist" at the end was ok, but it wasn't anywhere near as great as the one in "The Sixth Sense," another of M. Night Shyamalan's films.
Also, I wished that more was told about what was going on around the world. Events from around the globe were shown via television broadcasts that Mel Gibson and company watched as things progressed, and this technique worked very well. The lack of information on that subject was, of course, intentional, since it added to the tension, but I still wanted to learn more about the extraordinary events that had to have been occurring off-screen. Maybe the DVD will add a few more scenes in that regard.