i second "ultimately dumb"

Rating: 3/10 (22 August 2009)

There's no need for me to come up with my own clever review title, because someone else said it perfectly: "ultimately dumb."
This movie had so much going for it that I was particularly ticked off that Shyamalan dropped the ball. I went into this movie with little respect for Shyamalan. (Unlike most people, apparently, I never liked The Sixth Sense: thought it was tedious.) By half way through the Signs, I was thinking maybe I'd underestimated him. The storytelling idea here is really good: an alien invasion from the lonely perspective of ordinary people, who have no idea what's going on. The mood is fascinating.
But Shyamalan snatches defeat from the jaws of victory!
It's often been said that stories, like planes, are easy to get of the ground and fly, but very difficult to land. Shyamalan crashes this story with what may be the dorkiest plot fumble in the history of otherwise-good SF stories: the critical alien weakness turns out to be a severe allergy to water.
Oh, dear.
Back in my youth, I was an aspiring SF writer. I submitted a whole bunch of stories to SF magazines. Nearly all were rejected without explanation. The few polite notes that did explain the rejections all slammed me for numerous basic storytelling misdemeanours. Those editors easily picked up on practically any shortcoming as the basis for a rejection.
Shyamalan's dorky climax wouldn't have gotten past even the most forgiving of those editors. And yet he gets to make movies for millions.
The world is weird.