Found this old blog post from January 2003, which I’m reposting with a few edits here and there. I can’t imagine writing the first paragraph in 2009.
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So I finally got to see my second-most anticipated film of 2002 (the first was The Two Towers, naturally), M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. This was a huge disappointment, coming from the director of the excellent The Sixth Sense (1999) and the very good Unbreakable (2000).
Mel Gibson — showing his age, and shot from a much higher angle than he is ordinarily, making him look like the short fellow that he really is — plays a Catholic deacon of some sort who has lost his faith after his wife’s death. The film starts with him puttering about on his farm, his two kids (cut from the same cloth as that “I see dead people” kid whose name escapes me right now Haley Joel Osment), and his dour brother (played by Joaquin Phoenix). The dog starts barking. He goes off into his field and finds the crop circles. Actually, this is all in the previews, so everyone knows the beginning by now.
What is ostensibly an alien-invasion film turns out to be more of a “meditation” on faith and belief. That’s fine. But even Close Encounters of the Third Kind handled this theme so much better, as Shyamalan simply clomps around with it. It’s a bit of a mess: it’s part Field of Dreams, part Night of the Living Dead; there’s a Bernard Herrmannesque theme for the opening credits, and the deadpan jocularity of The X-Files running all throughout.
The real heavy-handedness comes in when Gibson sets it up midway — in fact, Shyamalan gives the goods away very, very early — when he tells Phoenix something to the effect that there are two kinds of people: those who believe in signs (that things happen for a reason), and those who think it’s sheer coincidence. (Surely there’s room for skepticism somewhere there?) Simply put, are there really such things as coincidences?
This would be fine as the movie’s core question for the viewer to ponder — but the “coincidences” are, alas, so clumsily stacked on top of one another that the conclusion looms too clearly for us. (And does one really need quick flashbacks to events that happened ten minutes before?) The seams are showing in the way Shyamalan structures his screenplays, unfortunately, and by the time we get to the ending the thrill is gone. And indeed, seen in the context of his two previous films, it’s clear that the higher power here is Shyamalan himself.
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Again, this is one of those films where we are beat over the head with the figurative. There’s really no way to avoid it in Signs, as that’s all the movie is about. The thing I am always asking myself is whether people really do need to have it spelled out for them; do “everyday people,” as M. Night has set up these folks to be, really ignore or not see the signs around them? As well, in the end, he himself is guilty of giving us a not so deep set of signs to read. This is also the problem with his later film, Lady in the Water. Goodness, what happened to M. Night? Didn’t he used to be more complex than this?
Posted 13 Jan 2009 at 9:17 am ¶I can barely remember the movie now, except for the fact that I was disappointed about the obviousness of the “big reveal” at the end. I’m a sucker for alien / crop circle-type movies as well.
I did rather like “The Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable” — the latter more than the former, “Unbreakable” being a superb psychological exploration of the comic-book superhero’s origin story (something always compressed to a few minutes in other movies) — although those were only single viewings.
Posted 15 Jan 2009 at 3:44 pm ¶Post a Comment