• Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan
• Starring
  • Mel Gibson
  • Joaquin Phoenix
  • Rory Culkin
  • Abigail Breslin
  • Cherry Jones

(Fair warning: Spoilers are plentiful and unapologetic.)

Contrary to popular belief, this is not a smart movie. Plenty of people think it’s smart, but that’s mostly because one of the movie’s main goals is to convince audiences of its intelligence. “Look how smart I am. Aren’t I smart? There’s no reason to doubt that I am smart. I mean, I sound smart, don’t I? And I look smart. And then there’s all the times I tell you I’m smart — that’s gotta count for something.”

It’s a visually mature movie, yes, and Shyamalan exhibits a quietude, almost a gravitas, in his storytelling that is a welcome change from the filmmaking trend which has added “frenetic” to the vocabulary of the world’s movie critics. But that does not make a movie smart; it only adds a very impressive veneer and backdrop to the essential dumbness.

Our lead is played by Mel Gibson, which means that he’ll have many opportunities to look soulful and forlorn, just as Bruce Willis did in Shyamalan’s two previous movies. (I’m assuming there’s some kind of law in place to keep Shyamalan from ever casting Nicolas Cage as a lead — the sheer density of the soulful moodiness would pose a threat to civilization as we know it.) Gibson plays Graham Hess, a Pennsylvania farmer who recently removed himself from the clergy. He lives on the farm with his two children Morgan (Rory Culkin) and Bo (Abigail Breslin), his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) who’s moved in to help the family cope with the death of Graham’s wife, and two dogs. Oh, and some tall clicky-voiced aliens who’ve started making crop circles in Graham’s corn.

“Food – Lodging – Panicky Humans”

Graham’s ready to dismiss it as a joke by the town yee-haws, but weirdnesses keep piling up. One of the dogs becomes scared and vicious, to the point where Morgan has to kill him with a barbeque fork to protect Bo. Bo starts dreaming of monsters and having prescient “feelings.” And then Graham and Merrill sight someone on the roof of their barn, someone who should have had no way to get down and disappear before they got there.

And then their local weirdnesses become part of the big picture, when an all-networks bulletin interrupts all TV programming to tell them of… crop circles! In India! (Please. All networks? Over crop circles in India? Indiana, I could accept, but the plight of distant foreign countries are usually worth no more than eight seconds of tightly-edited footage during “World in a Minute.”)

I’ll be fair, the first half of the movie works pretty well, mainly because there are no explanations as of yet. The dread comes from the incomprehensible nature of the occurrences, the feeling that not only are things happening which are outside our experience, but are possibly beyond our ability to understand. Sorta like the vast government conspiracy in the first two or three seasons of The X-Files, when our knowledge was fragmentary enough that no one could get a handle on the whole thing — all we knew was that it was vast and conspiratorial and likely to jump out at you. Boogah!

No, this vidcap isn’t particularly funny… until you imagine them with Amish beards.

But just like how The X-Files lost a considerable amount of its creep factor when the Things Beyond Our Ken were reduced into the outlines of a comprehensible plot (I think the show officially jumped the shark the first time that the concept of “alien bounty hunter” came up), so too Signs hits a downward spiral when it gives us the Hesses watching accounts of a worldwide invasion on television. And the more it tries to show us what’s REALLY going on, the dumber it gets. Even the introduction of the spooky baby monitor can’t stop the downward spiral.

For instance, we as asked to believe that having individual aliens wander around aimlessly, making things go bump in the night in rural Pennsylania, is an acceptable tactic for a global invasion plan. We’re asked to believe that crop circles are some sort of signpost or landmark for alien navigators who can’t otherwise navigate by means of latitude and longitude, major geological formations, or patterns of urban development. (You can all just hear the saucer driver, can’t you? “Dammit, I am NOT lost! I’m just looking for three concentric circles with a cross-like thingy coming out connected to another circle! It’s somewhere right along here, I tell you!”)

And we’re asked to believe that this invasion force is composed of oxygen-breathing aliens who nevertheless are dissolved on contact by… water. That’s right, these aliens are apparently related to triffids and the Wicked Witch of the West. But even the Wicked Witch didn’t specifically seek out a planet with three-quarters of its surface covered by water, and then run around dew-filled cornfields naked.

You haven’t seen corn this scary since Children of the Corn Part XXVIII!

Now, there are some writers out there (I’ll not embarrass them by identifying them) who think that focusing on such mundanities as plausibility and suspension of disbelief misses the point, because the movie has a POINT. As Graham elucidates for Merrill’s benefit, there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who believe that everything happens for a reason, and those who believe that there’s no reason to anything. Graham had been one of the former as a reverend; then when his wife was killed by a driver asleep at the wheel, he lost faith — or rather, he refused to trust God any further — and professed himself to be one of the second sort. It took the extremities of an alien invasion to lead him back to recognizing that, yes, everything happens for a reason. This, these writers will tell you, is a deep thematic point, and it more than compensates for petty and niggling lapses in trivial arenas such as “plausibility.”

This, I contend, is utter bunkum for two reasons:

1) A deep and heartfelt theme does not excuse other artistic lapses. I recently read an essay which made the point at least as well as I could, so I’ll simply point you there for some supplemental reading.

2) This supposedly deep theme isn’t. In fact, it’s about as shallow as your average rain puddle. Look, I’m a Believer with a capital B, but if you present me with the false dichotomy of either EVERYTHING’s meaningful or NOTHING’s meaningful, I’m going to have to choose the second. Because you know what? Shit happens. I don’t think it’s necessary to believe that God intends and wills every event in order to believe in God, but this movie leaves no middle ground; it’s all or nothing. In the real world, it’s so easy to disprove the former beyond a reasonable doubt that the false dichotomy forces the thoughtful person into believing the latter.

Yup — traveled 600 lightyears, mostly to say, “Boogah!”

But Shyamalan goes to great lengths to construct a scenario in which NOTHING is coincidence or happenstance; everything DOES matter. Morgan has asthma so that when an alien sprays poison gas in his face, his lungs will already be closed and he’ll come through unharmed. Bo leaves half-empty glasses of water (or half-full, if you prefer) all around the house so that when they realize that these aliens dissolve when wet, there’ll be plenty of ammunition close at hand. Even Graham’s wife’s cryptic last words six months before, “Tell Merrill to swing away,” were uttered to that Graham would tell his brother to take his record-breaking home run bat off the wall and beat the everloving crap out of the alien with it. All so that Graham would be reawakened to the reality that God has a reason for everything.

Heck, you could even say that the entire alien invasion, complete with their undefended weakness to water, and the massive ancillary deaths which are mentioned in passing, were engineered by God to give Graham his faith back — a faith which, you recall, Graham would not have lost if God hadn’t aimed a pickup at his jogging wife.

While we’re at it, I really have to wonder how much of a reverend Graham was if his trust in God was so easily shaken. “Easily”? No, I don’t mean to belittle the pain of losing a spouse, a pain I can only imagine at present. But all the same, I’m not unaware of it intellectually, and I hope that when/if it does happen to me, I’ll be far enough from that teenagerish stage of “No one has EVER felt like I feel!” that I won’t feel singled out by the cosmos to suffer, that I won’t think that somehow I’m justified in giving up where millions of bereaved spouses before me have persevered. it’s even more galling that Graham was a reverend, a spiritual community leader, whose pastoral career had probably included comforting and counseling other surviving spouses. How immature must his faith have been, that the introduction of common human pain into his life suddenly made him feel betrayed by God? Had I been a parishioner counseled by this man in a time of my own trial, I would have been madder than hell that he felt somehow exempt from grief in his own life, and reacted to his own admittedly agonizing but nonetheless common tragedy by lashing out at God in offended rage like a self-centered teen.

Them’s my kind of people, there.

The only way any of it makes any sense is if a single small substitution is made: Everywhere that the concept “God” comes up, replace it with “Director.” Because it’s only in fiction that every single detail has meaning and intent. So what Shyamalan has done here is literally play God, crafting a tale full of characters whose only purpose is to finally realize his divine hand in manipulating their stories and lives. In a sense, every creator plays God with his work, but it takes a, um, special breed of auteur to slip into the self-declared role of divinity within his work so smoothly. And just to take it one step further, the driver who killed Graham’s wife, who keeps going on about how it felt “meant to be”… was played by M. Night Shyamalan. It that isn’t a clear sign of director-as-deity hubris…

This movie does end up having one clear redeeming quality, though it doesn’t compensate for the shallow metaphysics of the premise: It’s funny. The humor was obviously meant to relieve the tension of the unrelenting creepiness, but once the suspension of disbelief has snapped like an oxidized rubber band, the humor comes to the forefront. Graham’s unpracticed attempts at lying, his and Merrill’s halting attempt to describe their intruder to the sheriff, and of course, the tinfoil hat tableau, all lurch directly into the realm of comedy once the nail-biting premise shows itself to be an emperor without clothes.

Here’s a note to Hollywood: Entertain us. Excite us. Challenge us with storytelling technique, if you can. But please, leave off the facile and shallow attempts at teleology. If I want puerile profundity, I’ll ask a thirteen-year-old who’s just discovered Robert Pirsig.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 1, plus 2 dogs (and all those people that God doesn’t care about)
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0