#98: Signs

Studio: Touchstone Pictures / Blinding Edge Pictures / The Kennedy Marshall Company
Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, Abigail Breslin
Release Date: August 2nd, 2002
Box Office Total: $227,965,690
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Why It's Awful

There are two things I hate: M. Night twists and movies about God. There are Chinese sweatshop workers who follow patterns more differently than these two. In God movies the protagonist is always a disbeliever placed in unlikely circumstances, such as an alien invasion or a vampire apocalypse. I'm not questioning God's plan, but I like to think that if the Bible is a guidebook to life there would at least be a chapter on how to make tinfoil hats or stake grenades. This movie proposes that God made us spend around two thousand years studying for an exam on piety and living simply, and then gives us a test on God damn space lasers.

During the ensuing chaos the protagonist always meets a believer, and when this person tries to talk about Gods love the protagonist responds by screaming about the stupidity of believing in God in such a cold, cruel world. This is because the only way anyone can ever be an atheist in a movie about God is if he has the heart of a wounded dove, one that has fallen from the skies of graces and lies broken and twisted in the bushes behind the pretzel cart of divinity, a place where you can smell the pretzel...but you never get to taste it. Then, at the climax, when all hope seems lost and the only available option is divine interference, God does exactly that, sometimes through subtle ways like the butterfly revelation in I Am Legend. or not so subtle ways like the big dumb blue hand at the end of The Stand.

M. Night movies are just as formulaic. Like the Big Bang, the laws of cause and effect don't appear to apply outside of a two scene radius. To make the analogy fully melt your brain, imagine that an M. Night movie is a particle that can exist in a thousand different superstates at once, and any attempt to observe it affects it and provides the stupidest possible outcome. You can watch an entire M. Night film about one thing, but the big twist always makes it about something else. Signs is a movie about aliens, but its really about God. The Village is a movie about monsters terrifying a colonial village, but it's really about some modern day method actors who absolutely refuse to leave character.

The revelations are always presented in the same manner too. The main character always comes face to face with the movie's opposing force and as his eyes widen, the flashback containing the minor events you weren't supposed to notice begins. Then, when everything has been explained to you in baby terms, the montage ends, and the movie cuts back to the protagonist giving the camera a shocked look as if to say, "Are you as surprised by this turn of events as I am!?" And that's why combining the God movie with the M. Night twist is akin to rubbing two penises together and expecting heterosexual results.

"God works in mysterious ways" does not make a good premise for a movie. At best it's a convenient explanation for why grandma never comes to Thanksgiving dinner anymore. But in the hands of a storyteller gone mad, the motif always involves God killing the hell out of everyone in a roundabout fashion to teach one particular asshole that "He" does exist, and if it takes the near-global extermination of humanity to right the path of one wayward sheep then so be it. Come to think of it, a deity that allows a species to propagate at the top of the food chain for a few millennia just to kill everyone and make one particular person feel like a dick for it shares my sense of humor, and I would like to shake His hand and buy Him a beer.

An alien invasion is the catalyst for Shyamalan's script God's plan. At the beginning of the film a race of intergalactic travelers subtly announce their arrival on Earth by drawing elaborate crop circles in the fields of farmers all over the world, most notably protagonist Reverend Graham Hess's. These "signs" are the precursor to the worst conceived invasion of anything ever. The next 90 minutes that are ultimately rendered completely irrelevant by Shyamalan's inevitably zany twist ending center around the the events leading up to and the entirety of the invasion through the eyes of the saltiest of the earth family since Mr. Peanut and his millions of bags of delicious offspring.

They managed to pry Mel Gibson away from his machine that grinds Jewish babies into Jack Chick tracts long enough to get him to play the preacher out of faith heading the Hess family, Reverend Hess. Having lost his wife in a horrible accident, he questions the existence of a God that could allow him to lose one he loved and cherished more than anything else on Earth to an M. Night Shyamalan plot device. This accident, along with his brother's failed baseball career, his son's asthma, and his daughter's aversion to drinking water all come together in ways that wouldn't make sense outside of the context of WHAT THE HELL!?

Because 9/11 taught us that the natural response to terrifying events is to cocoon ourselves in blankets and watch CNN for 24 hours a day, most of the events of this movie are presented by some corn farmers watching satellite TV. Through these newscasts we are given a glimpse into the alien battle plan.

Phase I

Arrive on Earth. Try knocking on the front door. If no one answers look under the doormat for a key. If there is no key maybe try one of the planet's windows or something and hope they don't have those weird ones with the two layers of glass or screens with screws that may require basic tools or finger dexterity. If THAT doesn't work, write obscene messages all over their front lawn with the death rays.

Phase II

Engage cloaking devices and enter Earth's atmosphere. Set gravity drives to hover and wait above large metropolitan areas. Broadcast all transmissions on open, shortwave frequencies. Maintain position. The Earthlings will protect their skies with tiny organic missiles called pigeons. But fear not, these "pigeons" are stupid and weak. When they collide against our invisible vessels they will fall to the ground dead. When the humans see their greatest defenses raining from the skies their spirit will be broken. The humans will be ripe for conquest and probey things.

Phase III

Intelligence says that Suzie Randall of 124 Oak St. is having a birthday party. We have confirmed a Hannah Montana ice cream cake that is to be consumed before lights out. Your secondary objective is to investigate rumors of a possible clown and pin the tail on the donkey.

Phase IV

Armed with nothing but our sugar highs we shall nakedly assault the pigeonless humans. All who are not enclosed in closed-door-bearing, windowless rooms shall be ours for countless days of scientific experimentation and political polling. Victory. Is. Ours.

As the alien's sinister plot thickens, the family turns to Graham for faith, which I guess might matter if they were worried about the aliens being vampires or chupacabras, but as it stands, they're not, and his inability to explode the aliens by screaming "Jesus" at them results in building tension that explodes one night at the most awkward dinner since The Last Supper. Somewhere around the time Phase IV begins the family barricades themselves in the basement and wait it out until someone somewhere realizes that the aliens who attacked a planet mostly covered by water dissolve in said water, and humanity makes its final stand in an unshown battle that I can assume later got the developers of the Super Soaker weapons contracts with DARPA.

Worst Scene

When Graham realizes that his wife's dying words as she hung pinned against a tree weren't just gibberish, they were telling his future self to get his brother to do what thousands of years of inherent survival instinct should have taught them - to hit the scary thing in the face with the nearest available blunt object. That's why, though Signs fails as a movie, it overwhelmingly succeeds as a giant middle finger to Charles Darwin scribbled in the middle of some farmer's corn harvest.