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>> Signs is M. Night Shyamalan’s
latest vanity project

by MATTHEW HAYS

Well, the trailers are creepy. And parts of the movie are. But Signs, M. Night Shyamalan’s third feature film, after the immensely successful Sixth Sense and the not-so-successful Unbreakable, is largely a disappointment.

The premise is intriguing. And Shyamalan’s skill at creating outrageously weird and spine-tingling situations remains keen. There is Mel Gibson, father of two plucky young children, whose brother (Joaquin Phoenix) has joined the family after Gibson’s wife was killed in a nasty car accident. The four stick together as an odd family unit. Meanwhile, strange things are happening on their farm. Crops are being mysteriously trodden down by unknown forces. Who on earth is doing this? Or, as becomes the question, from what planet are the beings who are doing this to earth? Soon, the family is huddled around the TV, watching CNN-like panic-TV reports about similar phenomena around the world. Paranoia takes over. Is the world under attack? Is this the end of humanity?

Perhaps not humanity, though it may mean the end of Shyamalan’s contract with Disney. Some suits there saw fit to hand him a multi-million-dollar cheque and carte blanche to do virtually whatever he pleased, on the strength of one movie. Unbreakable came next, proving the director was, well, breakable, and now this.
Signs’ general creepiness and occasional clever motif (the TV is used, both as a theme and a prop, extremely well here) are sound; what’s less reliable is the film’s overall ability to hang together. There are some nice ideas, but others that don’t follow through. Gibson plays a priest who has lost his faith, and it’s impossible not to think of his offscreen moralizing while watching him get it back during Signs (this is the man, after all, who played throwing a homosexual out of a window to his death for laughs in Braveheart). And you can feel Shyamalan’s wonky, nauseatingly New-Agey spiritual beliefs oozing through most of the frames of this movie. I didn’t feel enlightened by film’s end, I just felt like Shyamalan’s a flake.

Part of his dilemma is being a victim of his first hit film’s massive success. As with Unbreakable, we’re waiting for the Eureka Moment that was so pronounced in Sixth Sense. Are they all dead? Is this a dream like that entire season on Dallas? Is this a sequel to E.T.? We’re left holding our breath for something that never really forms, at least not in any tangible, concrete sense.

The treatment of the aliens is telling as well. Shyamalan seems to be subscribing to a faith in a higher being of some kind, in the idea of fate. But the terrorist aliens, who are kept fairly mysterious, appear to be outside of this earth and thus are not part of any fate. They’re just downright evil.

It’s an odd little moral universe, this one. I’m still holding out hope for Shyamalan’s next concoction, of course. Signs isn’t what I’d call a full-blown success, but it’s not entirely a failure either. And this filmmaker should be commended for creating something different, if not perfect. :

Signs opens Friday, Aug. 2

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