Signs | Review

Shyamalan’s feature entertains but fails to keep up the pace.

A film plot design of having aliens come down to earth for the type of activity that leads to human anal probes and plenty of mass destruction has become a laughable and diluted idea for film, mostly because of how Hollywood has treated the subject matter in sci-fi flicks that load up on cheesy gizmos and radically stupid human behaviour of man battling it out with little green men. Viewers who are expecting to be heavily thrilled or moderately chilled might be disappointed by his newest feature-there is no bang for the buck but rather a simple device that brings about the titillation in this film. Call it the ‘fear of the unknown’ a plot contrivance in which Hollywood filmmakers thrive on when putting together a cinematic feature- in the case of director-writer M. Night Shyamalan this element is pretty much a given when he writes his film scripts, furthermore, he adds the calculated ingredient of ‘keeping the audience’ and the screen characters ‘in the dark’ a signature of sorts that adds plenty to the viewer’s pleasure. With an extra touch of the supernatural we have a film that goes a little beyond the fear factor style of filmmaking and actually makes the viewer contemplate the threat about alien life forms and the more importantly what if flying saucers did come for a visit?

Signs has a rather simple narrative- family gets freaked out by odd occurrences while a former father, as in priest and a father, as in family played by Mel Gibson (We Were Soldiers) tries to come to terms with his faith and comes to grip with his new life. His young family his younger brother-Joaquin Phoenix (To Die For) son- Rory Culkin (You Can Count on Me) H20 friendly daughter played by Abigail Breslin must deal with all the spookiness that occurs and with all the underlying themes of family, beliefs, spirituality and the infatuation with media-it makes for a film, which is a more than just about plain crop circles. Shyamalan is particularly effective in setting up the story and the characters with a quick set-up of the 5 W’s saving plenty of time for the fun and mystery of the rattling noises from the bush. Rather than have a blood soaked knifes we get corn fields, dark basements and excessive use of flashlights as devices used too build up the tension and not much is done in the special effects department. In the same method of the master of suspense Hitchcock made harmless looking birds scary in his 1963 film The Birds, – Shyamalan takes the everyday sights and sounds like empty swing-sets, eerie frequency sounds from a walkie-talkie and shots of feet running around a house. Even the idea of showing UFO’s hovering over cities as a breaking news story on the tube has somehow more of an effect then if we had the family witness a piano key number of lights from a space craft parked in the drive-way. The film is captured with a nice selection of shots and neat camera positioning, especially in the first half hour where there are a lot of spatial set-up shots for the house and the surroundings and some neat two-shots, three-shots and even four-shots, these shots help show the unit of the family, the strength of numbers and shows how good Gibson is at acting with children. The unfortunate turning point for the narative is within the film’s climax scene of a Louisville slugger and Phoenix’s character as the number 4 in the starting bat-up which is such a major turn off, feeling like a bad train wreck-the film as a whole manages to escape but not totally unscathed by this narrative blunder.

The Sixth Sense (1999) showed that us that Shyamalan knows how to have fun with his audience surprising them with the most basic of devices, Unbreakable (2000) proved that he could develop a more elaborate and obscure plot, where as Signs demonstrates that he can make a film without Bruce Willis. This is the type of film that will amuse rather than amaze –there are plenty of good things going for this film even a couple of good moments of humour- (e.g. the anti-alien reading human mind helmets) but not enough to catapult this film as an absolute must see.

Rating 2.5 stars