"Signs" Annoyances and Nitpicks (Contains spoilers)

Cafe Society
21

Has there ever been an “aliens invade” movie that ever made consistent sense? I’ve never seen one. The very concept of hostile E.T’s coming across lightyears of void with hostile intent, in any form that can be fought against (be it with baseball bats or uploading the latest Melissa virus to the mothership’s mainframe or with the common cold) is simply goofy, but the concept’s never been about making sense, it’s been about fear of the unknown, faith of the importance of humanity, and fear that that faith is a fiction. Every alien invasion film touches on that.

Way I see it, Shyamalan fully recognized the inherent goofiness of alien invasion, and deliberately played on it in a very enjoyable way.

22

I had a problem with the whole concept that “we have to show the audience what the crop circles actually are.” I think a stronger movie could have been made without a definite discovery as to what the circles are for. After all, the context of the story is the search for and discover of meaning, grace, faith, etc. I understand that to be at least a bit more mysterious than what took place in the movie. This was the first movie I saw by Shyamalaman, and I was disappointed. It didn’t live up to my understanding of his reputation.

23

Thanks, monstro. About the water thing: it wasn’t that deadly to them. It’s not like the Wicked Witch of the West. It hurt them a lot, but at the end of the movie, after Joaquim Phoenix has delivered a vicious beatdown and liberal soaking to the alien, the thing still wasn’t dead, at least not yet. It was still breathing when he ran outside to check on Mel and the Culkin kid. We don’t even know if water can kill them. Maybe it only incapacitates them, or gives them a painful skin rash, or something. The point is, we don’t know.

It’s not clear that earlier crop circles were part of the alien plan. Sure, it’d be quite a coincidence if humans, on their own, made crop cirlces as part of an alien hoax, and then real aliens showed up and also used crop circles, but hey, that’s what the whole movie is about.

The gas seemed to be a natural defense mechanism, not a tactical development. And I think they wanted live humans. Gassing major population centers would just give them a bunch of corpses.

One thing I realized defending the aliens in this movie is how much I have to fall back on, “We don’t know that for sure,” and “There might be a lot more going on that we never see.” Which are the same sort of arguments you often hear when discussing God. “He passeth all understanding,” “He moves in mysterious ways,” “We cannot understand His great plan,” and so forth. I can’t help feeling that this was deliberate on Shyamalan’s part. I forget, does that make me the first kind of person, or the second?

24

I’m now realizing the gas was lethal because Mel Gibson was scared that it had killed Mackauly Culkin’s brother. I think I mistook it for ether or something. So now it all makes sense. :wink:

25

The major league record is 565 feet, set by Mickey Mantle. The minor league record is certainly longer than 507 feet, but maybe he held the record for a particular league or something.

As to the movie: Loved it. Loved every minute of it.

Yes, the alien was stereotypical, humanoid, and its weakness was remarkably cliche. They did not attack en masse with lasers blazing a la most science fiction movies.

However, that wasn’t really what the movie was trying to do; the film was SUPPOSED to use B=movie cliches. That’s Shyamalan’s thing; he takes B-movie concepts (Ghosts, aliens, superheroes) and fleshes them out into scary films with serious themes. It’s his modus operandi. The alien was SUPPOSED to be cliche, and it had to be something a family could fight off because the point of the movie was the family, not a Will Smith-led global war.

But to defend the movie’s logic for a moment, I don’t find the notion of the aliens being remarkably unprepared for combat to be all that unusual. Imagine human beings travelling to an alien world and discovering a species we’d like to harvest and doing so, only to find they’re far nastier than expected and have vials of sulphuric acid sitting around the house. The initial encounter might indeed turn into something of a disaster. Who would have thought to bring acid-resistant raincoats?

And frankly, we don’t KNOW the aliens lost the battle. Maybe they won and their losses were acceptable given thier needs and the mission they were on. Maybe they’re coming back in force. Maybe they’re interstellar losers. We don’t know. The movie was about one family, and details about the aliens are quite unimportant.

26

I saw this movie today. Count me in with the impressed. Like others who have commented above me, the theme of renewal of faith was more interesting than the alien invasion.

After the movie, when my wife and I were discussing it, all we talked about was the “God works in mysterious ways” and what seemed to be a coincidence actually was part of a larger purpose. Those types of themes.

We didn’t talk about the aliens at all.

(My 11-year-old stepson, on the other hand…)

…from ending…
Morgan: "Did somebody save me?
Graham: “Yes, somebody did.” (fade to scene with him putting on his priest attire)

Beautiful

(I must admit, though, that I did catch myself thinking, “Didn’t these people have any guns in the house? What kind of farmer’s family doesn’t have at least a couple of guns?”)

27

I for one was assuredly not expecting “Independence Day”, and would’ve been even more disappointed than I was had it turned out that way. What disappointed me was that I was hoping and expecting to be given a sense of mystery, a sense of the unknown, a sense of ‘there may be things out there we don’t understand’.

This was accomplished successfully in “The Sixth Sense” (although the big surprise was disappointingly obvious), and seemed to be heading that way in “Unbreakable” (but unfortunately I had to leave the movie half-way through). I was hoping for the same thing - a realistic build-up of puzzlement, obscurity, strangeness and supernaturalism. And for the first bit “Signs” succeeded - there was that palpable sense of curious fear as the circles appeared, and the strange goings-on around the house. Even smaller things, like the young girl’s water obsession, which we didn’t find out until later was something she’d had since birth - her water habits added to the sense of mystery, as in 'what is happening to her?"

But then it started to go awry, and for me I could no longer suspend belief once i saw the aliens’ form, as well as the ‘lights over the city’. It jarred me back to reality, as I couldn’t help but think “can’t they be more imaginative than this?”. I want these types of movies to so engross me that I think ‘wow, it could happen like this, these things (life after death, supermen, aliens/crop circles) could exist’. And if the filmmakers can’t produce that, which I think is an almost explicit promise of Shyamalan (considering all the hype he’s getting) then I call it a failure.

Sure, the subplot was the real point of the film. And although the movie hit us upside the head with the obviousness of this, it was still well presented. But since my belief in the movie was lost earlier, I no longer believed and in essence cared about this subplot.

Anyway, there is no denying that Shyamalan has some great talent and potential. Some scenes I thought were remarkably well done, like the alien attack on the house, some of the cut-shots that spooked the hell out of me, and the humor was well-done.

But for me it doesn’t make up for the disappointment. It seems as if Shyamalan is getting to the point where he has to explain it all to us, rather than just making the movie be as believeable as possible and trusting our intelligence.

Good luck to him on his 4th movie.

Wow, did I really just write all that?

28

**

I don’t think so. MNight just made that up; the whole conversation was spoken in such generalities that I think it was nothing other than a plot device. (He can hit the ball real hard, but he also whiffs a lot. Whooping the alien was his redemption, right? BTW, it would have been quite funny imho if Joaquin/Leif Phoenix, whateverhisnameis, had swung and missed … leading to his whole family’s demise. Just a thought.)

FWIW, although I was never a collector, I used to have some Topps “Future Star” baseball cards from the late 80s/early 90s; for some reason, I still remember that one of them said Willie Ansley (Houston’s No. 1 pick in '88) hit a 550 foot homer for Columbus (GA). I think that card was from 1990, which might make sense, considering that Ansley was drafted out of high school, probably played Rookie or Short Season A ball in '88, then played in a Low A league such as the Sally League, in which Columbus (iirc) was a Houston affiliate.

I don’t have the card anymore, obviously, so take that one with a big grain of salt.

I agree. That’s what I keep telling myself. Still…

Here’s my question: Why the hell was the alien still there? Was he confused? Was he a lone wolf? Did he just need a daddy?

All his buddies had gone, or so we were to believe. Mel’s alien either didn’t see that on the bulletin board or was part of a “sleeper cell” operation.

29

Yup - I thought of that immediately, too. I’m wondering if it was intentional - I can’t think of any one thing that mirrored the Bigfoot shot exactly, if it was the alien’s long arms or the way he walked…

30

All we know at that point in the film is that Merrill heard on TV that the aliens had left, hardly a guarantee they had actually all made it off the planet. Hell, my local affiliate can’t even report the weather correctly that’s actually happening right now.

31

The gun thing caught my eye too. My grandma’s farm had guns, they were older antique guns, but they probably could have been fixed up in a hurry (especially if freaky aliens were walking on our roof). I was plesently surprised it was actual aliens and not ghosts or a dream or some other nonsense. I wish more of the alien subplot had been focused on, even though it wasn’t the main point of the film, but that is the nerd in me (hey, the nerds were right, the movie said so!!). Will Humanity unite and build an intersolar battle fleet to save our kidnapped brethren? Maybe that can be Mel Gibson’s next war movie (except the aliens would have to be the British…)

Bleh… CGI aliens always look terrible. Only Lucas can pull them off partially convincingly, and that is because he owns the company and can spend whatever he wants on them. And before one of the CGI-Secret Defenders comes in to claim “Blah blah you can’t tell CGI from reality because sunsets are too good blah blah” notice i claimed ALIENS looked fake, since living stuff is still out of CGI’s arena yet. I could probably photoshop sunsets into a movie and make it look good.

32

Right, that’s clear, and I do agree that debating plot holes in the whole alien invasion business is kind of silly, since that obviously wasn’t the point of the movie. But what I’m wondering is: what was the point of the movie? I’m perfectly fine with its not being a movie about aliens, really. And I’m fine with its not being particularly scary. But you know, it is a movie, and that implies that something is going to happen in it. As far as I can tell, Shyamalan’s “modus operandi” is taking B-movie concepts and putting them into rambling, over-long movies that telegraph each plot twist from the start of the movie. And then present a trite ending as if the movie’s just said something meaningful.

Granted, Signs is a much, much better movie than Unwatchable, but that’s faint praise at best. It’s still got all the same faults. And like the other one, I kept waiting for the big climax, the thing that wraps it all up, and left disappointed. Maybe it’s just a pacing thing; I suppose that the ending, where all the coincidences are finally tied together, looked good on paper. But in the movie, since nothing is going on for most of it, you pay more attention to the dialogue and you can’t help but notice things. Like that they’re talking a lot about Joaquin’s baseball career and how he keeps a bat on his wall. And like the girl has a phobia that makes her leave glasses of “contaminated” water all around the house. And the kid has asthma and needs an inhaler. And of course, every night Mel has a nightmare about his wife dying, to remind us that she left these clues.

And it’s definitely not like I’m some super-genious when it comes to figuring out movies; a lot of the time I don’t get everything that’s happened until long after the movie’s over. I guess my biggest problem with it is that it just felt like a germ of an idea that was never developed. And it just didn’t warrant a whole movie; it would’ve been perfectly fine as an episode of “The Outer Limits” or something. I liked the message of the movie, really; I just think that it was told so poorly that it didn’t have any weight to it.

33

If you recall the news report, it mentioned they had left some of their wounded because they took off in a hurry. The poor schmuck may’ve spent most of the invasion still locked in the pantry.

34

i think it was more than that even - the way the alien looked at the camera, the shakiness of the home video. Not sure either if it was intentional or not, you’d think someone as steeped in the supernatural as Shyamalan would’ve seen this, but then again he may not even been born when it was shot (i’m too lazy to try and track down the real date.

35

But don’t you think we’d notice, in our scouting, that 80% of the planet was covered in the stuff, and it regularly fell from the sky? I mean, when the news reported that ships were over 200+ cities, was it not raining in at least one of them? Maybe they should come to cities in the South and Midwest, where the summertime humidity hovers around 80%

The book the boy was reading did mention this possibility–that they’d leave, only to return in hundreds or thousands of years to whoop our asses.

As I was leaving the theater, someone behind me said, “It’s great that God saved that one little kid, but what about the millions who died and were captured?” Although I’m willing to concede that it wasn’t necessarily “the hand of God,” but that the penultimate scene was what caused Mel Gibson to regain his faith.

36

Also, did anyone think it was strange that that long-haired dirty guy was in the Army recruiting office? He just appeared out of nowhere and he certainly didn’t look like the type to be hanging out in an Army recruiting office shooting the shit with the crazy recruiter.

I guess most of this movie seemed so implausible to me. I suppose that’s the point though. Everything might happen for a reason, but when you’re watching something that somebody wrote, you want some plausibility.

37

The Birthday Party scene scared the shit outta me! You expect monsters to be in the dark unpopulated areas…

Also, we don’t know that water is the alien’s weakness. It could have just been this one’s. The news said that the Middle Eastern cities had found a primitive way to combat them, but they didn’t say what. Could be country music ; )

My guess? Someone spat on the alien in disgust right before it was gonna kill 'em, and watched the thing shrivel.

38

Maybe it wasn’t the water that was poisoness, but the chlorine added to the water.

39

monstro–the family lived out in the country, and most likely drank well water. Which, as far as I know, is not chlorinated or fluoridated.

Oh, and I meant to add this to my earlier post: at one point, it’s mentioned that the alien ships all appeared within 1 mile of a crop circle. So what was within 1 mile of the Hess family farm?

40

Just saw this movie a second time, and actually appreciated it more. I love the very first shot, which is of the front yard from above; you soon notice it’s slightly wavery, because it’s through window glass. Throughout the movie, Shyamalan takes advantage of the old scary-movie principle that something barely glimpsed is more frightening than something clearly seen.

Noticed something I hadn’t before. When Houdini the dog appears to be sick, Graham mentions calling the family doctor. It seemed odd to me that a farmer with dogs wouldn’t have a regular vet. But this time I noticed, when Graham went to Ray’s house, a sign saying that Ray was a vet. So I guess since the accident he’d avoided contact with Ray, and didn’t have another local vet to go to.

I also found the music by James Newton Howard to be very effective. (Howard also scored Shyamalan’s previous two movies.) Fortunately, John Williams and Danny Elfman don’t get to score all the movies.