I just searched Cafe Society and didn’t find any links to answer my question.
Why did aliens who are adversely affected by water come to conquer a planet that’s 78% covered in water?
At least the poor, spotty headed aliens in Alien Nation didn’t have a choice since they were stranded and were considered refugees due to their slave status.
Because it was much more dramatic that way?
Oh, you meant for real – How about water is essential to grow their favorite food: flesh.
Or: Earth was the only inhabited planet within range.
Or: They were in the neighborhood, so stopped in for a quick snack.
Considering the movie didn’t really get into the aliens motivations, I don’t think you’ve found the holy grail of inconsistencies in it’s plot. More like one of the smaller holes in the block of swiss cheese.
Signs had an EXTREMELY poorly conceived plot. I have no idea how it got to be made. Surely there were other scripts that had fewer plot inconsistencies.
I’d offer an explanatio for your question if thought that there was one.
Just a dumb movie.
I like Signs a lot. By contrast, Independence Day really bugged me because it made no sense. The difference is that Signs worked on a level of character and emotion, and Independence Day didn’t. If a movie gets to me emotionally, I’ll forgive quite a bit. Blade Runner, for instance, doesn’t really make a lick of sense logically, but works very well as a sort of fable.
A lot of the criticisms of Signs, incidentally, are based on assumptions, not on things definitely established as facts by the script. The biggest is the assumption that the creatures in the movie are aliens from another planet. That’s what the characters in the movie are assuming, but it’s actually only one possible explanation. They remain essentially a mysterious force. Making crop circles for navigational aids doesn’t make sense – but that’s another assumption. Maybe they have a religious or ritualistic meaning.
But if you want a science fictional explanation for space aliens with a severe reaction to water – I guess I’d posit that it’s specifically fresh water they have a problem with. Most of the planet’s liquid water is salt water, and so are the bodily fluids of mammals.
Yeah this is cited as a great plot hole by people who didn’t like the film but it really isn’t that important. The details about the aliens are really not very important for the film.
In any case it isn’t difficult to think of possible explanations. In addition to the ones mentioned above maybe the aliens just weren’t familiar with water and didn’t really know in advance that it damaged them. If some time in the distant future humans explore far-off planets it’s quite possible they will come across something unexpected which harms them.
How aren’t they aliens? They had flying saucers, couldn’t stand H20, etc. Unless you meant that the aliens were actually just people in costumes, then I totally agree. Damn those were bad fx.
They didn’t have flying saucers–they had blurry lights in the night sky, and invisible death zones in daylight. Those things were, in the theme of the film, co-incident to them, but a connected incident so they weren’t coincidental, they were signs, same as the crop circles.
I maintain they were demons; the water didn’t burn because it was fresh, it burned because it was holy.
It’s become rather clear that this is a rather minority opinion on my part, but I can live with that. 
As far as I’m concerned, this movie didn’t work on any level. The characters were bland, the tension was non-existant and the plot holes (of which there were many) were too extreme to ignore.
Sorry, but it was just a badly written/directed movie.
I guess I’m nearly alone in liking “Signs”. If I hadn’t seen the credits, I would have assumed it was a David Lynch flick; it had all the sideways types of humor that DL jams into his movies.
Consider the scene with the military recruiter: priceless humor! Or when Merril is holding the bat, and glances at the plaque that says “330 feet” (or whatever); how can you NOT picture an alien noggin sailing over the cornfield, flipping end over end? I mean, this movie was FUNNY. And I think it was meant to be. I hope so, anyway!..Timmy
I loved Signs. People get hung up on SF type details, ignoring the fact that this was a movie about faith, not aliens. It was a damned good movie.
a. I didn’t like Signs. Not because of the scientific or logical improbabilities, but because it was boring and preachy, and because I think Shyamalan could have done so much better.
b. The aliens are, in fact, just a pretext to the story. It’s not a story about aliens, but, as Rikwriter pointed out, a story about faith. A bad story about faith, but in any case the aliens are secondary to the story.
c. It’s not very improbable that the aliens would come to a planet that’s so harmful to them. What do we know about them, anyway? It could be that Earth was their only option, as their home planet was dying out and Earth was the only more or less inhabitable planet within reach. It could be, as has been pointed out, that the aliens weren’t that familiar with water and had underestimated the effect of it. Maybe the aliens had fully calculated the risk (keeping away from the water), but had underestimated the ‘intelligence’ of those weird-looking bipeds they saw all over. It’s really not as improbable as it sounds: chances are, when we venture into space , we’ll have to settle with much more hostile environments than the aliens found.
Think of it this way: if we found a planet that was 78% sulphuric acid and 22% perfectly inhabitable land mass, wouldn’t we take the risk? I’m pretty sure we would.
I do have a (sort of) answer to why the aliens came to a planet that is mostly water.
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they most likely didn’t even know that water was harmful to them - if they don’t have water on their own planet (it’s highly possible), they have no way of knowing it’s a harmful substance
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one character in the movie (I forget which one, but it wasn’t one of the main ones) says that s/he sees the aliens carrying families away, like they are harvesting them. If they are only coming to earth to harvest people and take them away, why would it matter if most of the earth is toxic? they’re leaving anyway
and for the record, I liked Signs too! Merril was great…“the nerds were right!”
Staying away from vast bodies of harmful substances is hard if there are regular bouts of precipitation composed of those harmful substances.
Harvesting people? Humans are 70 or 80% water, they might as well consider the fruit eaten in the Star Trek space hippie episode as a viable solution for world hunger since everyone who is hungry will end up dead. They could make people jerky but using humans as livestock is expensive.
Yes, the movie’s about faith but I just couldn’t get over the aliens.
If it’s a movie about “faith”, it shouldn’t have been advertised as a thriller. Second, I don’t give a rats ass about “faith”, thus this movie ripped me off and stole my money,
Big question #2:
Is the guy so important that God’s actually willing to destroy most of the planet to convert him?
Big question #3:
How would that work and still be capable of being called a god of love, since if the killing’s solely meant to convert him, then it’s thuggery. If it’s meant to show him that being a christian is a good way to protect oneself, and then kill a good 99.99999999999999999999999~% of the population, then it’s still thuggery. there’s not too many options for that, especially since if he’s going to become an atheist over a car crash, then how on god’s green earth would doing that much damage convert him?
Big question #4: How can anyone like this piece of shit called a movie?
I never worried too much about these inconsistencies. How about this: The aliens we saw weren’t the aliens in charge, but instead were instant aliens, kind of like Marvin the Martian had. They were disposable, and not too bright, since all they had to do was live long enough for a fair percentage of them to make it back to the mother ship with snacks.
As for the crop circles, we make quick and dirty markings every day, even with the availability of advanced tools like GPS. For example, who hasn’t seen orange spray paint on the road in a construction zone? The city engineers could use GPS markings, or depend on the blueprints, but it’s quicker, easier, and more dependable to just put a big “X: manhole goes here” on the ground in orange paint.
Also, we don’t know that the aliens were here to conquer the planet; anything we’re told about the aliens’ motives was presented to us a speculation of the same order as cargo cults. The whole point of the aliens is that we don’t know anything about them. This was part of the movie’s whole faith versus knowledge theme. You can have faith, or knowledge, but not both; faith is the leap you have to make when knowledge abandons you.
As for the aliens, I just figured they stopped by for supplies on the way to someplace more important, and left when their food started killing off enough drones to make it unprofitable to stick around.
And Duderdude2, I saw it as a thriller with faith as an underlying theme. I was entertained and thrilled. I know I’m not alone, since at one point, when the alien got into the basement , my wife shrieked and grabbed my hand so suddenly her nails drew blood. The only movie that’s scared my wife enough to draw blood. Unfortunately, it was my blood, but what are you gonna do?
Any species with enough knowledge to build spacecraft is going to know what substances are harmful to them. I don’t have to chug a glass of acid to know it’s dangerous, as people with knowledge of chemistry have been kind enough to make this information available to us.
Secondly, if the mistakes and bending of the laws of science were minor or honest misunderstandings I could overlook them, but screw-ups of this magnitude can only come from great apathy, ignorance, and plain old stupidity.
Am I the only one who saw the whole film as a homage to the classic B-movie? I assumed the reason they were afraid of water was because that was the cheesiest, most “B” alternative possible. I didn’t see it as being about faith at all except in so far as many of the best B-movies had some sort of ahem “deep and meaninful” ahem “subtext”.