Signs

So you might be wondering why I watched these films out of order.  The Village before Unbreakable and Signs. I would like to tell you there was a reason for it, like Shyamalan movies are actually better if you watch them in a specific order. However the truth is, I watch these movies as soon as they are available on some kind of streaming service. The Village and The Sixth Sense were on Netflix, Unbreakable was on HBO but I didn’t have access to HBO for a week or so and Signs just came onto Hulu. As much as I want to stick to chronological order (and I think I’m going to moving forward) that doesn’t always happen that way.

But I’m back on track, I just finished Signs and man are there things to say about this one, because while Shyamalan had been trying to maintain a sense of mystery and serious drama about his film, for some reason he broke form and decided to make a straight up comedy about an alien invasion and called it Signs.

And yes, I know that Signs was not a comedy but intentional or not, this movie is hilarious.

Signs takes place on a small isolated farm in Pennsylvania owned by Graham Hess (played by Mel Gibson). Graham is a former priest living with his brother Merrill (played by Joaquin Phoenix), and his children, Morgan and Bo (played by Rory Culkin and Abrigail Breslin). Since the death of his wife, Graham has lost his faith and lives a quiet life with his family.

But that quiet life is disrupted by unexplainable crop circles in his corn field. It is soon revealed that there is an alien invasion and Graham will do anything to keep his family safe.

The first thing that I need to mention about this movie is that it does show off the creative mind of M Night Shyamalan and how he tackles a situation that has been done in movies to death. Usually when there is a movie about an alien invasion, it is seen from the perspective of the government, or the military, or a special science lab. But this story shows the situation through the eyes of a small family in the middle of Pennsylvania. We only see the reaction of the rest of the world through the television. There are actually very few instances where they show the rest of the world’s reaction, just the reaction of this family and the small community they live in. While that kind of sounds boring and it is by no means executed incredibly well in the film, I do have to give Shyamalan points for taking on a situation with a different lens.

The main appeal of this movie is Mel Gibson. Yes, the man is pretty despicable and he has said and done some horrible things. But taking the actions of the man out of the performance, you actually get a really genuine attempt at a concerned father dealing with an alien invasion. The truth is, there are some parts and some interactions that don’t make a whole lot of sense considering everyone in this movie, including Gibson must have been given some really weird directions on how to deliver their lines. While Gibson gives a pretty good performance in this film, there are still things you can give him shit for in this film beyond being a terrible person in real life.

The best example of the poor deliver of lines and performances is Rory Culkin. This kid is like 12 years old and he delivers some of the weirdest lines of the film. Because this is such a personal story, it is expected that the kid is going to have a pretty big part and I think this might have been Shyamalan’s last attempt to try and direct kids into giving him his Haley Joel Osment gold again. Like I said in my Unbreakable review, Spencer Treat Clark did an okay job and was probably unfairly compared to Osment. Culkin is not even in the same ballpark as those guys. His performance is pretty bad.

And then there’s Joaquin Phoenix. I have never understood the hype around Joaquin Phoenix. Maybe I just need to break down and check out Walk the Line as that is really the only performance I hear people praising him a lot on, but one performance does not make a phenomenal actor. I mean look at Jared Leto. They can still have missteps and just because their recluses and don’t take on mainstream roles, doesn’t mean that they are Daniel Day Lewis.

What I’m trying to say is that Joaquin Phoenix doesn’t add a whole lot to this film. There are some moments where he adds some (probably unintentional) comedic relief, but overall he just kind of stares and does awkward exposition.

But the performance that almost saves the entire movie is Mel Gibson’s. I won’t say it’s the best performance I’ve seen him do but it might be one of the best attempts to save a movie I’ve seen in a while. The script is pretty poorly written and like I said, it can really be unintentionally funny. But Gibson is one hundred percent in this film and there are some pretty genuine moments that I felt and believed every emotion that Gibson was giving. There’s a great scene where Morgan is having an asthma attack and they don’t have his medicine. Graham pulls his son against his chest and talks him through his asthma attack. It is a really great scene because you know that this man has gone through tragedy in his life, so much that he loses faith in his god. Suddenly he sees someone he loves deeply being taken right in front of him and he both has a conversation with his son and God. Knowing what we know about Gibson, he is an incredibly spiritual guy and you can tell this scene was incredibly personal to him, or at least it seemed that way.

But even with Gibson’s really great acting, it is hard to look past the poor acting and the in your face experimentation Shyamalan is doing with his cinematography. Like I mentioned in my Unbreakable review, Shyamalan has a unique cinematography style and this was his third big block buster movie. I suspect he was thinking this was another opportunity to experiment with his unique style and really make his style historic and groundbreaking.

To be fair, I don’t know if I was as aware of the jarring style this time around as I was when watching Unbreakable, however, it still is something different where it works sometimes and doesn’t work so well later on.

Now something that I do have to give Shyamalan a little bit of credit on is that there isn’t really a big twist in this film. I guess there kind of is but it really doesn’t do a good job at concealing it if it is one. Roger Ebert praised Shyamalan for deserting the twist trope because after two movies he had already built an expectation, an expectation that he didn’t need to fulfill every time. He’s the director and writer, he can do whatever he wants. If he wants to write a script without a big twist, that’s totally fine.

But the biggest issue with the film is just the story and its execution. There are some pretty genuine moments as well as one moment in particular that I thought was a little bit creepy and set up a good creepy atmosphere. It’s the scene where Mel Gibson is running through the cornfield and has a brief encounter with the alien. I thought that scene was a little suspenseful and well shot.

Beyond that, the movie is pretty heavy handed with its message of destiny and faith, but unfortunately it doesn’t exactly fit with an alien invasion story that is trying to both be heartfelt AND suspenseful and scary. I’m figuring out that M Night Shyamalan started off his career telling really personal stories and he was pretty good at it. But Signs is a weird movie because this situation doesn’t feel personal. You want to hear what’s going on in the rest of the world and you want to hear how Mel Gibson plans to have his family survive this world changing event. Instead we get a pretty condensed story about this guy, his family, and his struggle with his faith, which wouldn’t be bad if the script, acting, and cinematography was better. 

Overall, Signs is a missed opportunity. There are a lot of things Shyamalan would have to change to make this movie as good as his previous ones but somewhere in the mix is a good movie. Gibson brings a really genuine performance, the idea of sharing the experience in the confines of one house as a man who has lost his faith has to have faith that his family is going to be okay in the middle of this human disaster. There is a lot of good stuff there. But the end result is just goofy and unintentionally funny. I get the feeling this is the first of many movies that are going to be unintentionally funny and we’re far from the bottom of Shyamalan’s fall from grace. After this film there was a Newsweek article that said that Shyamalan was the next Spielberg, but this movie began the beginning of the end. Signs is still better than The Village, but after The Village, there was a horrible slope we’re heading down. Won’t you join me for it?

But those are my thoughts on Signs. A film with some potential but overall unintentionally funny and poorly performed by players that were critical to the movie’s success. What did you think? You can comment and discuss below! You can also send me your requests on Twitter @MovieSymposium as well as send me your ideas for what I should review next on the blog. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out soon. 

I'll leave you with this. Here's what I have next... Lady in the Water... SO pumped... Enjoy!