Signs – Movie Review

Today’s review will be on a movie of family, of religion, and how everything that happens always does so for a reason. It’s a film with actors expressing emotions that will make you feel things you ever thought before with personalities so advanced it will make you question yourself and all the decisions you make.

I am of course talking about M Night Shyamalan’s Signs.

Wow, this film is bad. Oh so bad. How critics and audiences were giving it a lot of praise to the point that even Newsweek was calling Shyamalan the next Spielberg bewilders me. The acting is not well done, it forces ideas onto the main protagonist, and the plot twists could have been better. I had to watch the movie twice in order to understand better why audiences have given it such great reviews and maybe there is some features to this movie that gives it a popularity.

I think one of the big factors that makes this film appealing to many is that it’s a film of a man regaining his faith. The main character, Graham Hess, played by Mel Gibson, lost his wife in a car crash six months before the present time and after losing her he lost his faith in God and quit being a reverend. Yet while that hurt Graham Hess, we throughout the film he doesn’t show much distress over the event, which to me makes it look like Graham has mostly recovered from the loss of his wife. And yet throughout the film every character pokes at him and remind him of his former duties, as if saying to him, “Go back to the church and love God again.” It’s forcefully trying to push him back into faith and that’s annoying as hell, especially when he’s trying to get past a horrible loss and is succeeding in doing so. At one point I almost wondered if this whole alien attack was just a ploy of God to get Graham to be a reverend again. Whatever the case, I think the plot has tricked a lot of people with making it look like Graham was a broken man who needed faith to be whole again when he was doing fine in his recovery and caring for his family.

I give this opinion on the main character because Gibson did very well with the material that was given to him. Joaquin Phoenix, playing Graham’s brother, Merrill, also had some good scenes of acting in this film despite what was given to him. His reaction to the reveal of the alien especially was great because while the audience often wasn’t terrified of the alien, the way his character reacted felt so real that it felt like a genuine reaction. The rest of the characters though did not do well, especially the children, Morgan and Bo. They almost always have expressionless looks on their faces, have monotone voices throughout the whole film, and react in ways that don’t make sense. For example, what would a little girl do if she saw a monster in her room? Most likely they would be scared, go to a parent, and ask for them to get rid of the monster or hold them. But in Signs the girl, Bo, goes to her father and in a voice that to me rivals the “Oh hi Mark” scene from The Room tells her father there is a monster outside her room and asks for a glass of water. All in one breath, no emotion, and not at all how a normal little girl would react. After her we also have a general guy who thinks big baseball players like having their toes liked by beautiful women, an old man who thinks soda companies are making crop circles to sell their beverages, and an annoying feminist police officer. How could such weird and honestly unnerving character reactions be ignored?

What can’t be ignored though is the failures of the aliens in this movie. While the characters in the film (or at least Hess and Merrill) do react well to the fear and danger the aliens present to them, I and many others were not that intimidated by them for obvious reasons. Not the designs of them, even though they look like a stereotypical Martian, but how easily they could be defeated. These aliens have mastered space flight, have cloaking technology that is hundreds of years ahead of human radar, and want to take over the world. And yet they cannot open a locked door and despite being allergic to water they attempt to conquer a planet that’s over two-thirds water! How can an audience, or even the characters, not see these aliens as not very dangerous if they cannot get through a wooden door and have bodies that melt when touched by water? In fact, a lot of air on our planet has water vapor in it, so how do their bodies not melt or burn when they are exposed to our atmosphere?! What’s worse though is this reveal of water being their weakness is revealed half way through the film by a character played by the director! They say it because the crop circles aren’t near water, but there’s hardly any evidence from just that statement to confirm that water is like acid to the aliens. I could rant how stupid these aliens are, but I’ve got one more major thing to vent about before going into the technical aspects of the film.

Now to give the film credit, the first half of the movie was pretty good. It almost made me question the reputation of how bad the film was. It set up the story pretty well, the elements of the film were decent, and while slow it was enjoyable. But after this one scene where a huge report about the alien sightings on TV is being recorded the story starts to fall apart. After that scene we course have the Shyamalan cameo and early twist reveal and the boarding up of the house because the aliens can’t get past wood or doors, but we also get a disturbing dinner scene that almost made me turn off the film. Morgan and Bo ask their father to pray for the dinner and he says no because he wants them all to enjoy the meal and get ready before the aliens arrive. They try to force Gibson to pray, with Bo saying she dreamed of this and Morgan unexpectedly declaring he hates him and he let their mom die, leading to both crying when Graham just wants to try and make this possibly final meal something everyone can enjoy. It was unnerved, almost scared of that scene because of how much these children, like a lot of other characters in the movie, were trying to force Graham to go back and work for God again. And what was worse was that Morgan is the first to comfort his father in his moment of breaking down. The emotions and forcefulness was just wrong in this scene and that’s when I my idea that Signs wasn’t as bad as some people give it fell apart.

Despite the plot and acting of the film being horrendous, the work with the cameras and scenes wasn’t too bad. Not great, but not terrible. There are a few things that aren’t done well like the camera pans, which are used a lot in this film despite being done in other films as ways to convey tension or suspense. However there is a good use of recordings to present situations of the aliens to our main characters and a lot of the other camera work and sets were done in a realistic way that made it feel like an ordinary world. I didn’t see many props, environments, or camera angles that felt out of place, so it made the setting feel in tune with what we knew of the characters and how some of them acted. If only that acting wasn’t so bad the film would feel more on point with the ratings it was given.

Overall Analysis

Again, I didn’t like this movie. Even if I had not watched the Nostaligic Critic’s review of Signs months and months ago I would have seen this as a bad film. There just wasn’t the emotion or believeability to the film to make it appealing to me. Not just that, but I just hated the children in this movie. They were bratty, hardly expressed emotion, and just didn’t act like realistic children. I mean I never got to go into detail with Bo’s irritating pickiness on her drinking water or Morgan’s know-it-all attitude. Along with a less than descent script, lame plot twists, and a ridiculous wrap up of the movie, Signs definitely isn’t as good as what people think. Part of me feels that a different director could have made this a much better film, but instead we had Shyamalan who is often questionable in his directing style. Signs does have an interesting concept behind it, but the execution could have been better. The twists as well could have been different, like maybe the aliens were actually trying to help people or maybe Graham and Merrill were just crazy? Who knows. If you still enjoy a story of a man trying to regain his faith in God you can give it a watch yourself and see if it holds up. In the end I give Signs a 3.5 out of 10.