SIGNS

By: Abbie Bernstein
Review Date: Friday, August 02, 2002

Writer/director/producer M. Night Shyamalan seems to be making a career out of taking standard genre items and making them distinctive by approaching them from new angles. In THE SIXTH SENSE, it's a ghost story and the making of a medium; in UNBREAKABLE, it's the superhero origin myth.

With SIGNS, Shyamalan tackles the extraterrestrial invasion yarn, mingling it with a sentimental look at a family man struggling with matters of love and faith.

Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) lives in rural Pennsylvania on his farm with his young son Morgan (Rory Culkin), younger daughter Bo (Abigail Breslin) and unsuccessful ballplayer brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix). Graham was the local reverend but his wife's death six months ago has caused him to turn his back on not only his calling but all religion as well. Then crop circles appear overnight in the cornfield, too intricate and perfect to be the work of pranksters. TV news reveals that this is happening all over the world. The children are understandably frightened; Graham and Merrill are spooked themselves.

It's probably not giving too much away to reveal that the aliens are real and, at the risk of spoiling just a bit more, they aren't friendly. Most films in this genre look more like INDEPENDENCE DAY, unless they're very low-budget Shyamalan may have made the first star-powered, big-budget science-fiction/horror film to wage no-tech warfare in a confined space for a goodly amount of the running time.


There are a few solid jump scares here, along with a more pervasive sense of dread that is as much a byproduct of Graham's status as a father as the possible impending doom he faces. Parents probably always worry about what to tell their kids when scary information comes over the TV, but the issue has been brought to the forefront in the last year. In an odd way, SIGNS provides a bit of metaphorical observation/dramatization of how families with young children coped with coverage of Sept. 11 the film never aggressively draws the parallel, but it will work for those who make the connection.



The parent/child bond winds up being where the emphasis is in SIGNS. Although Shyamalan does have some good, creepy sequences, his heart seems to be in showing Graham's love for his family in extremis. How well one responds to this aspect of the film depends largely on one's taste for sentiment. It's sincere and a lot of the dialogue is legitimately, intentionally humorous, and Shyamalan keeps things moving so that it never develops the attempted-heart-tugging-in-a-vacuum quality of, say, DRAGONFLY (which had one or two elements in common with SIGNS). On the other hand, the love, loyalty and hope in the face of almost certain destruction gets laid on a bit thick.

The aliens are alarming in their presentation, but not as fully thought-out as they might have been. (By the time we get to a crucial bit of information omitted by the TV news in the story, it seems an egregious omission.) The Hess family's decision to try to ride the crisis out at home, however, makes sense both character-wise and in reality not everybody would want to become part of a crowd under these circumstances.

Gibson projects innate goodness and concern as Graham. There's a case to be made that perhaps the actor and the script both give us a protagonist a bit more simple than necessary, but with Gibson in the role, any hint of slyness might brace us for a superhero turn that doesn't come. Phoenix is a surprisingly good match in both physicality and manner the two actors seem here as though they could be brothers. Cherry Jones is impressive as a very levelheaded local sheriff.

SIGNS certainly isn't the definitive film about an alien invasion of Earth, and THE TWILIGHT ZONE and its relatives have provided a multitude of versions (some better than this) of ordinary folk coping with extraordinary peril. Still, SIGNS is entertaining, occasionally scary and has an original (if sometimes treacly) point of view on its subject.

Questions? Comments? Let us know what you think at feedback@cinescape.com.