Reaction to "Signs": the religious theme overwhelms the sci-fi thriller
When he was still in his late twenties, M. Night Shyamalan seemed to appear full blown as an important Hollywood director when “The Sixth Sense,” (1999) starring Bruce Willis and the amazing Haley Joel Osment, was a big box office hit. Actually when “Sixth Sense” appeared, Shyamalan had already directed two forgotten movies, the first when he was 22. He’s written the screenplays for all five of his own movies, including the less profitable “Unbreakable,” and also for “Stuart Little,” which appeared the same year as “The Sixth Sense.” Now with another major production, “Signs,” just out, “Newsweek” has run a cover calling him “The next Spielberg.” Maybe he is, since Spielberg has produced flops too, both artistically and financially.
In some ways Shyamalan is, I agree, a wonderful director. I love the fact that he can work in a popular vein and still appeal to sophisticated viewers. He manages to operate in conventional ways and still create fresh effects. He’s great with actors. He writes his own stuff. He has chutzpah; he has control. But while an admirer would say he plays the audience like a violin, a detractor would say he’s just manipulative. The only thing that’s really clear is that he’s a director to watch. I wouldn’t be likely to miss one of his movies, and I was out on the first day of release to see “Signs.” I had a good time, as did the large, predominantly young Friday night audience I shared the experience with. I wasn’t deeply moved, and I wasn’t even scared. But I was entertained: I had fun. In the end, I was still in doubt, though, about how great a future lies ahead for M. Night Shyamalan. Another Spielberg? That could be all too true, in view of the mixed box office and artistic success of Spielberg’s most recent efforts.
In a way, “Signs” is an improvement over Shyamalan’s two previous movies in that it drops their hokey spirituality and mysticism in favor of a simple quest for faith, seen in terms of Mel Gibson’s rediscovering his commitment as an Episcopal minister after six months of taking off the collar when his wife dies in an accident. After a bout with aliens that leaves him, his two small children, and his younger brother still alive and well, he decides that the world is not random, after all. As part of getting down to basics, Shyamalan makes no attempt to be original in his plot, and throughout the movie he borrows from a lot of directors and films including Speilberg, Hitchcock, “The Night of the Living Dead,” “Field of Dreams,” “The Birds,” and a host of others. The debt to Hitchcock is signaled at the outset with the self-consciously Fifties looking credits with accompanying “Psycho” knockoff music by James Newton Howard. Shyamalan welds all these influences and sources together openly and shamelessly to create a kind of “American Gothic” of a sci-fi alien movie with an overriding religious agenda.
Here we have everyman, living in everyhouse, with everybrother and everychild – two everychildren, actually, played with generic charm by Rory Culkin (as Morgan) and Abigail Breslin (as Bo). Shyamalan brought out Bruce Willis’ tender, sensitive side: one could almost say he created a whole new Bruce Willis. He does something similar with Mel Gibson as “Father” Graham Hess, this man full of doubt and anguish. Gibson is a little grimmer and a little more humorless than one might wish, but what can you expect? The man has lost his wife in a horrible accident, he’s lost his faith, and he thinks he’s about to lose his remaining family to nasty creatures from outer space that cut huge patterns in his cornfield and appear poised to take over the earth for their own devious purposes -- to “harvest” the human race, voices on TV and radio say. This is a lot to handle, even for Mel Gibson. He does a good job. Joaquin Phoenix seems an inspired choice as Merrill, Graham’s neer-do-well baseball hero younger brother. Phoenix, who can make a loser warm and sympathetic, brings a little ordinariness into the scene: Mel Gibson alone would be too iconic, and the kids too generic. We have to be grateful for Phoenix’s presence here, and indeed for that of Shyamalan himself as the culprit who caused Graham’s wife’s death.
In the early scenes Shyamalan strives for simplicity. Actors are constantly photographed head-on. This somehow makes the dialogue more effective, and it’s often funny. The director doesn’t take himself so dreadfully seriously this time – well, not all the time. The picture of the two kids and Joaquin Phoenix sitting on a couch with conical foil hats is charmingly silly. Shyamalan is having fun with the gimcracky tradition of Fifties sci-fi movies here. The veteran cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, who filmed “Badlands” and some of Jonathan Demme’s best movies, provides consistently striking and beautifully lit images.
The trouble with the later part of the movie is that manipulation really does take over and obviates the need, it would seem, for plot. Why do Graham and Merrill board up all the windows? Who’s told them that the aliens are headed for their house, or for Bucks County, Pennsylvania? When it was all over I felt cheated, remembering all the chills and thrills “Night of the Living Dead” takes you through in the same kind of situation. Instead of all the creepy ghouls and the humans horribly turned into ghouls, all we get is a tall skinny guy in a wet suit squirting some gas in a boy’s face. The point is that Romero’s ghouls are an engine that moves on its own and multiplies and regenerates itself, whereas Shyamalan’s aliens aren’t clearly established as anything. In his concentration on what happens to the lapsed priest and his little family in the iconic Pennsylvania farm house, the director fails to establish a sense of true menace from outside. The menace also ends all too easily. “They were turned back.” “They went away.” What about the boy Morgan’s information from a book that they’ll come back, madder than ever? Shyamalan doesn’t care, because his true agenda is to depict a restoration of faith. He’s juggling too many different colored balls in the air, and some of them get dropped.
"Signs" maybe not flawless, but very good.
I would bet that you were young and impresionable (as I was) when I first saw "Night of the Living Dead". It scared me as a child, but when I recently viewed it on DVD, the zombies simply lack any menace. The malevolent intelligence of the aliens in "Signs" makes them much more threatening. In fact, what isn't shown gets our imagination flowing. What kinds of ships do they have, what kinds of weapons and technology? This is ignored because we are seeing the "invasion" from the point of view of a family unit. We aren't the expert scientist (War of the Worlds) or the President in charge of the battle (Independence Day). The appearance of the alien in the living room gave me the same "goose-bump" effect as the appearance of the creature in Howard Hawkes "The Thing from another World".
If I were the two adult males and had heard on the news that the aliens were going to engage in hand to hand comabt, I would have certainly boarded up the windows and doors. In fact I might have rolled some tractors or farm equipment up against the doors a la "Dawn of the Dead".
I agree that the movie was somewhat manipulative, but Van Gogh certainly manipulated nature in his "Cornfield with Crows" Thanks God!, otherwise it would just be painting on the wall at Elmer's Pancake House.
Aliens were the bit player
As usual with this director, this was a powerful drama within the framework of a supernatural thriller. The aliens weren't explained beyond some snippets of news coverage that was just guesswork by the reporters. The lack of explanation is much better than too much exposition which invariably slows the movie and takes OUR imagination out of the equation. We were never sure if the aliens wanted to invade or just raid the human population for food etc. It was assumed that the aliens were using hand-to-hand combat rather than technology to avoid the nuclear capabilities of the humans. But rather than a thesis on alien tactics (which is slightly hilarious because this assumes we know what aliens would do if they showed up) this movie was about how this small family unit dealt with the eerie and menacing prospect of having to defend their homes from unpredictable invaders.
aliens shafted by Shyamalan
I agree with you, but I still stick to my point that the movie is hurt by the lack of development of the aliens because the writer-director let the religious theme take over to the point where he completely dropped the sci-fi ball . In a sci-fi horror movie, you have to make up stuff. M. Night could have kept the aliens completely invisible and unknown, and that might have worked. But having shown first the lights of their spaceships and then a glimpse of one plus some claws under doors, he had to develop them more than he did.
