That wasn’t just any long-haired dirty guy; it was Lionel, the local troublemaker whom Graham and Merrill initially suspected of making the crop circles (along with some set of twins, no doubt also trouble-makers and ne’erdowells). Graham had spoken to Lee, Lionel’s dad, and maybe Lee had given his son some sort of ultimatum that resulted in Lionel being at the recruiting office, filling out an application.
Curses!! Thwarted again!
Well, shit on a skateboard.
A few years ago, I wrote a manuscript of a horror novel – werewolf stalking a small Southern town, and the drifter who has come to kill it. Anyway, one of the climactic scenes in my manuscript was when a secondary character (father to the main character) fights the werewolf in his house. With a bat hanging on the wall. That he put there because he hit a really long home run in double-A baseball, back when he played.
The manuscript has been in (limited) circulation with publishers for a couple of years, but nobody has indicated any interest. Now, though, if I send it to anyone else, they’re gonna think I copied the baseball-bat idea from Signs. When, in actuality, I came up with that stupid bat treatment about eight years ago.
Crap crap crap. Baseball was an integral part of the father’s character, too. If I hope to sell this puppy now, I’m gonna have to completely rewrite him.
(Of course, I know that nobody’s gonna buy my manuscript. It’s just the thought of all that work going down the drain.)
Maybe they are those aliens from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. You know , the ones who accidently discovered interstellar space travel or something. Maybe they really aren’t all that smart after all.
Regarding the “why was that alien there at the end?” question: We get to see, briefly, in a closeup of the alien’s hand, that it’s missing two fingers. In other words, this is the one that was stuck in the veterinarian’s pantry and scared Mel. My guess is that the rest of the aliens left, the vet went back to his house thinking it was safe and inadvertently freed the trapped alien (bye bye vet), and the alien hauled ass back to the closest crop sign – in Mel’s cornfield, remember – to see if it could catch the last ride out of Dodge. Realizing it was Left Behind[sup]TM[/sup], it ducked into the nearby farmhouse to improvise some sort of escape or survival. It took the alien an awful long time to deal with the kid in its arms, which can be interpreted as, “Back off! I mean it!”
I have mixed feelings about the movie. The suspense works really, really well (dig that long static shot when Joaquin goes up the basement stairs, turns left, and disappears into the house for many, many seconds of silence), and lots of bits and pieces of the plot fit nicely together when examined in retrospect (the guy at the recruiting office, or the reason Mel doesn’t call the vet about the dog).
But as others have observed, the Big Ideas behind the film don’t really hang together. Give Shyamalan lots of credit for being willing to address these huge questions about life and experience; how many Hollywood filmmakers actually bother to ask meaningful questions in their work? But all the same, there are many, many nagging questions that cannot be resolved, or that threaten to contradict the film’s themes.
Shyamalan’s obviously a ridiculously talented filmmaker (the use of sound in Signs is brilliant, all by itself), but he’s teetering on the razor’s edge of being too self-important. His next movie, whatever it is, will be most illuminating as to his long-term ambitions.
Oh, and for anybody who’s wondering why I’ve been such a lazy ass about my website, Signs will be my first full-length review in quite a while. I should have it up later this week.
I loved this movie, despite some glaring plot holes. I agree that the alien invasion was really secondary to the main storyline.
One thing still bugs me though and it’s bugged me since I left the theater.
They use that baby monitor to pick up transmissions from the aliens. I only saw ONE monitor–where was the other one? In the house? The basement?
Were they picking up interference from the alien ships or were the sounds coming from the location of the second monitor?
I kept waiting for some sort of resolution to that, but never got it.
I kindo of thought that they would suddenly realize that the second monitor was still in the house (the basement) and thus realize that aliens were in their house the whole time.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m just reading too much into it.
Well, the receiver for a baby monitor is just a radio pre-tuned to a specific wavelength; the monitor you put by the baby’s bed is a short-range transmitter on that frequency. I never had the impression they were receiving a signal from the baby monitor transmitter, but were picking up a local radio transmission that happened to cover the baby monitor’s frequency. That means the aliens were using ordinary radio to communicate with each other (one reason I wouldn’t bother with a foil hat to try and prevent mind-reading). Other people must have been hearing the transmissions too, especially the hobbyists with multi-scanners.
Sauron, I feel for you. Don’t know how many times I’ve had an idea, and soon afterwards seen it in a book or movie; and then you can’t use it, at least not in the same way. I had an idea for a book about a medieval monk solving a murder mystery in a monestary that involved a rare work of scholarship; then I read Name of the Rose. Of course, I probably never could have written such a good book, but it’s still irritating. The novel I’m working on now has a scene where the protagonist is at the bottom of a swimming pool on a hotel roof, trying to batter his way through the bottom with an elevator counterweight while somebody shoots into the water with a .50 caliber machine gun; hope I don’t see that in a movie soon (unless I get to sell out to Hollywood).
i am always annoyed when people in the movies investigate instead of running away.
there is an alien in the pantry… well, golly, i’ll just walk in and let him out, duh, duh, duh. right thing to do: run away, go to your house, pack up the kids and go to the jersey shore!
i was rather upset by the dog’s deaths. although, did you notice that houdini did not get violent, until beau placed the water dish very close to him!?! hhhhhmmmm, nice touch.
uncle merry and i chased an alien (or a scandinavian olympic champion) around the yard. let’s go to town! wrong, wrong, wrong… leave this place, run away, go to an island off of maine!
perhaps the alien at the end was coming back to retrieve his fingers… he could have been trying to communicate: “give me the fingers and i’ll give you the kid.” with all the clicking and squeaking.
of course it would be a very short movie if eveyone used my “run far, run fast” theory.
Overall, I loved it. Lots of “jump” factor.
However
/hijack/
does anyone know anything about the paintings in the house? I think they were landscapes - very rounded hills, mostly pastels? What style is it, any artist who paint like this etc…? The camera panned these paintings a couple of times, and even stopped on one for a few seconds.
/end hihack/
If anyone enjoyed the “there are no coincidences” premise, pick up A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.
Talk about a book that makes you question divine purpose and faith!
Not disputing your criticism in general, but this example doesn’t work. When Mel & Bro. did the mad dash lap around the house, they didn’t know it was an alien; they thought it was Lenny or Leo or Lamont or whatever their enemy and his twins were named. The above-referenced conversation with the lady cop came after that.
Further, I don’t think Graham was still totally convinced of the aliens when he went to inspect the pantry. I think using a knife as both a defensive weapon and a viewing aid pretty well summed up his trepidation but also his need to know more.
Another interesting scene to me was when Meryl threw a rock into the cornfield, just to see what happened. (It’s also interesting b/c the windchimes created an anticipation that Something’s Gonna Happen, but M.Night, love him or hate him, isn’t that formulaic.)
See, people pointing out the plotholes of interstellar travel and somesuch, please realize that this wasn’t supposed to be a sci-fi movie. I think it was M. Night exploring deep questions. In 6th Sense, he posed the question “Is there life after death?”, in Unbreakable, he asked “What is evil?”. In this one he is asking about whether faith is something we need.
Did you notice a complete lack of guns? That is a big sign that it isn’t all that it first appears.
My guess on the scanners? Dogs can hear noises that are much higher than what the human ear can detect. The dogs heard them talking, and the noise was ship-to-ship communication very nearby.
Btw, the person playing the vet is none other than the director.
**
I recalled this after I posted. Maybe that particular alien just wanted a little revenge; maybe, believing Mel to be a bad mofo, the alien decided to take the son (I guess he’d know little Mac to be the son, assuming these aliens aren’t KPaxians and actually have families) as leverage.
Most likely, though, your explanation is correct. It didn’t anticipate being locked in a pantry and missed the rendevous. (BTW, to address the “why didn’t he break out of the apparent window in the pantry?” question way up on page one: That wasn’t necessarily sunlight; a walk-in pantry like that will always be equipped with an overhead light bulb, so maybe it was just on.)
Actually AmbulanceChaser, Merrill tells us near the end that the radio indicated that the aliens left in a hurry and left their dead and wounded behind.
Since the alien seemed to be the same one from the pantry I can only assume that it fell into the wounded category. My question is: After spending no less than 12 hours in the basement AFTER a gigantic “last supper” style meal, none of the characters says anything about having to go to the bathroom. I dunno 'bout you, but if I’d eaten a bacon cheeseburger (plus assorted odds and ends) I’d absolutely HAVE to go certainly by morning!
They never really got to dig into their dinner because they had that big emotional scene and then the invasion started. Of course, it’s a movie convention to kind of ignore that aspect of daily life, unless it’s a plot point; you don’t want to spend half the movie showing people going to the bathroom. (Like in The Sixth Sense, when the little boy is afraid to go down the hall to the bathroom in the middle of the night, but he really has to pee, so finally he duck-walks down there. Funny, and true-to-life.)
It’s funny, but I think I actually understand people of faith a little better because of Signs. I’m an atheist, I believe in coincidences rather than miracles, and even with an unlikely set of circumstances that saves my family, I wouldn’t think it was the work of God, anymore than I would if I won the lottery. I’m happy that way, but I think for some people, having faith is the best way to live. It’s great when faith gives people the strength to get through a crisis; unfortunately, for a lot of people faith means God is telling them to kill people.
[hijack]Also, it’s a setup where God can’t lose; I’ve been hearing people falling all over themselves giving God the credit for rescuing those miners (rather than all the people who worked their asses off), but not a word of blame for the cave-in. (Maybe it should be, “The Lord works in psychotic ways.”)[/hijack]
Did anyone else think that the poison gas the alien sprayed on the boy at the end was going to be some sort of cure for his asthma? I think I was expecting a twist at the end or something.
Oh yeah, I thought the movie was great. Effectively creeped me out.
Did anyone else think that the poison gas the alien sprayed on the boy at the end was going to be some sort of cure for his asthma? I think I was expecting a twist at the end or something.
Oh yeah, I thought the movie was great. Effectively creeped me out.
one more movie i don’t have to waste money on…
No, but what a strange twist!
I didn’t think it was poisonous (until the movie told me so, later). I figured it was some kind of knock-out gas.
Oh. That would fall under the category of poison – but poison that wouldn’t kill you under a certain dosage.
The cop explained that the delay had been caused by some strange woman who had caused some kind of fuss in a local business. That would surely take precedence over the discovery of a crop circle.