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"See what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, that sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky? Or, look at the question this way: Is it possible that there are no coincidences?"
Alright, let us get this out of the way: the aliens are weak to water.
And, yes, that is extremely stupid. Signs' entire ending is obnoxiously "neat". Four dozen things set-up by the script all come together as a pattern of miracles to save the day. The "swing away, Merrill" part might be the most painful and corny for me. But, of course, there's the water crap. If you're the slugs from The Faculty, Earth is a fertile paradise. However, if you're a hydrophobic species, be you the Shai-Hulud or the Little Green Man from Signs, Earth would be a hell world, and humans would monstrous creatures with acid for blood like the xenomorphs. Besides the fact the aliens seem woefully unprepared to conquer a species as well-armed and violent as yours truly. Water or not, we'd roll these fuckers in a day.
To appreciate Signs you gotta get over this, and there were times in my life that even I could not do that. This is all intentional, there is a creator's design at work, and the painful deus ex machina is not by accident.
I can tell you this: Signs is a better movie without the ending. I've tested this. When I was eleven my whole family drove to Elizabeth to see this at the brand new AMC theater, and it was truly terrifying. We only got to see the first eighty or so minutes before the power went out - because the aliens were actually attacking. (Nah, it was a big August thunderstorm.) We went back the next day to finish it, and even on first watch we thought the ending was lame. But "lameness" is the point, just like Hootie and the Blowfish songs.
Signs is an extremely impressive movie twenty years later. The narrative around M. Night Shyamalan was that each of his successive movies were always worse than the ones that came before. You start with a masterpiece in The Sixth Sense and then you descend down to The Last Airbender. We're past the point where I can say "Shyamalan is cool again", we're nearly a decade deep into his comeback now. And he's a an oddball writer whose particularities can be frustrating. Old features a rapper character named "Mid-Sized Sedan", there's a long speech about the nutritional benefits of hot dogs in The Happening. Beyond quirks, Shyamalan is a guy who is very demanding that the world open itself up to the supernatural or the divine or just conspiracy theory thinking. It's all exists on the same spectrum to him. Sometimes this is positive and inspiring (Unbreakable), sometimes it is utterly miserable (Knock at the Cabin), sometimes its just fucking pretentious (Lady in the Water, his actual worst movie). But he's never boring, I'll give him that. Signs might have once been narrativized as the film proving Shyamalan was losing his grip and giving in to his own hype. Now, it's an interesting movie from one of our greatest working horror minds. Check out his new movie, Trap, it's hilarious.
The water thing fits into Signs' inspiration, War of the Worlds. Shyamalan is following in the footsteps of the preposterous Nineties blockbuster Independence Day, and comparing the Clinton era War of the Worlds to the two films during Bush's reign is night and day. Signs' version is much smaller than a nation-wide scale, it chooses to shrink things down to the experience of one family in Bucks County, PA. (M. Night always repping Philadelphia and its suburbs.) Independence Day was this glorious statement of the End of History, how modern liberal democracies had defeated Communism, Racism, and would defeat aliens too, why not? Just a few years later, we got a dramatic reminder that history never stops happening in an event I'm sure you know well: the terrorist attacks of September 11th. And Signs will not be the only post-9/11 we're doing this month. Just three years later there's another War of the Worlds, equally rough and intense, this time directed by Spielberg.
Signs must have begun production in 2001 before the attacks, but Shyamalan felt something. This is as 2002 a movie as it gets. That was a year ripe with paranoia, it is easy to forget now how bad it was. 9/11 was several separate attacks in one day, followed quickly by anthrax attacks merely days later. (Turned out to be totally unrelated but nobody knew that then.) We therefore grossly overestimated the scope and power of Al-Qaeda's networks, never realizing that the hyjacking attacks were their best - and ultimately only - punch. I can remember the news coming up with all kinds of fantastical theories of where and how the next attack would come. The Bush Administration introduced this ridiculous Terror Alert Level, always left at 'Elevated', never did dipping down to 'Low'. So it never gave anything like actionable information. The news would run a rumor that Al-Qaeda might be targeting banks in New Jersey, or the mass transit system. And what do you do with that information? I still don't know. All we could do is be terrified for years until the 2008 financial crisis gave you something else to worry about.
Now of course, there actually are regular terrorist attacks in the US by mass shooters, but people seem surprisingly calm about that. Angry reactionary guys with AR-15s are acceptably "part of the plan" if they're home-grown, I guess.
Signs really plays into this gripping uncontrollable sense of your world falling apart - all on TV. We're just pre-internet for most audiences, so these terrible events played out on CNN or the radio in real time. This allows it to be practically a found footage movie. For much of its run-time the only alien you see in Signs is a blurry Cryptid at a birthday party in Brazil. "ES BEHIND!" The only spaceships appear in news reports. Every character has their own theories, often nonsensical or based on untracable rumor. The famous image of the family wearing tin foil hats turns out to be useless since the aliens are not psychic this time. The titular 'signs', the crop circles, are debated for most of the movie whether they're a hoax, some weird joke, or actual coordinates for a mass invasion. (Since even by 2002, we crop circles had been proven to be a hoax, even Signs admits how easy they are to make.)
The other major theme is more dear to Shyamalan's heart, and that's faith. 'Signs' could mean the crop circles, or it could mean the random items strewn across this scrip that add up like the lines of a conspiracy board into evidence of a full Divine Plan. It is a very Christian view of the universe, that all events all add up, no matter how mysteriously, into salvation. The exact mechanism of the mystery does not matter, faith is all you need. Our protagonist, Graham (Mel Gibson in his final major role before... all that stuff...) is this badly depressed widower, a half-asleep lapsed pastor. He has decided the death of his wife in a random car accident proves there is no God. He's joined by his loser failed baseball player brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) to help raise his two kids, Morgan (Rory Culkin) and Bo (Abigail Breslin). The 'Signs' are all here: Merrill was an Aaron Judge-esque player with a huge swing but too many strike-outs, so he's ready to beat the bop the shit out of the aliens when the time comes, and Bo leaves water all over the house to supply us with the alien key weakness. Morgan has asthma so the alien gas weapon fails. The mother's last words were "swing away, Merrill", and Signs will make sure you do not miss any element of how heavenly contrived all this is.
As a thriller and family drama, Signs is fantastic. We have four good actors in this family. The tension of grief and the children forced to grow up to fill in for their two damaged male parents is a good dynamic. The growing terror of this small helpless farmhouse all alone with unknowable things crawling outside is masterful. Tak Fujimoto shoots the Hell out of this movie with great shots with a lot of depth across the house, across rooms. Signs is a less than perfect alien movie because the CG effects do not look very good and ultimately they're disappointing creatures. But it's a great movie when the aliens are not seen, I cannot deny that. The last act is terrifying and heartbreaking, full of what feel like these forced moments of good cheer before the end, even they break down. James Newton Howard's score is living up to the Hitchcockian comparisons critics gave M. Night Shyamalan back in 2002. All-around really well-done.
There's also a very meta cameo by our director. Shyamalan plays the man who accidentally ran over Graham's wife. He finds himself apologizing to his own character for making him so miserable. He also hands out the secret to solving the movie. If you want divine Signs, here's a creator giving them to his fictional people.
Next time: ...Oh fuck me. ...Maybe I'll like it more twenty years later? It's AVP: Fucking Alien vs. Fucking Predator.... Yay...
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