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Signs
Pretentious Garbage
2002
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Mel Gibson, Joaquin Pheonix
Yeah, do that and skip the film entirely.
THE SETUP:
Aliens land on Earth without doing very much fact-checking beforehand, prompting a moronic “crisis of faith” in Mel Gibson and significant wall-scratching in the audience.
DISCUSSION:
As I felt when I walked out of Unbreakable, I want to find M. Night Shyamalan and hurt him. We're talking baseball-bat-to-the-knees hurt. This is because I: 1) wasted ANOTHER 2 good hours of my life under the false feeling that this one would be good, 2) the film is long and boring, and the pay-off is non-existent, unless you buy into the director's empty pretensions, and 3) the suspense is very cheaply manipulated and manufactured. The only small consolation is that he seems to only have 2 more films in him [The Village—one down] before he's run out of his bag of tricks. This one already shows serious evidence of creative fatigue.
This film is unbearably pretentious, though not quite as bad as Unbreakable. I was surprised for the first hour that things actually HAPPEN at a quick clip, unlike in Unbreakable, but he makes up for it by slowing the pace in the second hour. This is made doubly unendurable by his manipulative suspense-generating technique of cutting away from action whenever it begins to occur. Is there an alien clawing at the door? What better time for a 45-second shot of a stationary flashlight! Are spaceships landing outside? Then how about showing a blank wall for a full minute? Is your house being invaded by aliens? That's the right time for a long, lugubrious flashback, or a Hallmark-level family reminiscence! That'd be GREAT! It is a CHEAP suspense tactic to simply NOT SHOW something exciting that the audience knows is happening, or have your actors take 10 times longer to react to something. That's not skill, it's pretentious manipulation, and it's the main reason Shyamalan better stay away from me when I've got a weapon in my hand. This film would be 1/2 hour shorter if we didn't have to endure such maddeningly long takes. They may generate suspense, but not honorably. “The new Hitchcock” my ASS. Most reviews say "Shymalan knows that what's not shown is scarier than what is." First of all, second graders know that. Secondly, in this case that's because, shown or not shown, NOTHING IS HAPPENING.
The entire story is truly non-existent. Basically, something is ABOUT to happen, ABOUT to happen, ABOUT to happen (this is the "suspense" part), then, oops, it doesn't happen. The end. The entire story utterly flies apart at the end, makes ZERO sense, and is VERY unsatisfying. What we get instead is an extremely flimsy, sub-Oprah-level meditation of "faith." Well guess what, M. Night? When you tie your "message" into a story that ultimately turns out to be a big flat deflated balloon, your "message" is invalidated as well. There was an article in the 8/4/2002 NYTimes about "nonmovies." Movies that SEEM to have emotion, style, and substance, but it's all recycled, and only REFERS to emotion and substance. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to "Signs."
I do think Shymalan can be compared to George Lucas... a filmmaker who thinks that everyone should spend great amounts of attention and thought to his work, but doesn't think he should have to provide you with any incentive to do so, and doesn't think you should be rewarded for your effort, because the SIMPLE JOY OF WATCHING A FILM BY M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN SHOULD BE REWARD ENOUGH!!!! This is called "Narcissim."
The increasingly hysterical opening credits offer a clue of what is to come. There IS one effective moment, later, the newscast of the birthday party. But, let me ask you, how many newscasts will include the preceding 45 seconds of birthday party video footage BEFORE anything happens? Only M. Night Shymalan's newscast. I can see a parody of him on Saturday Night Live: as Mel Gibson is grappling with an alien offscreen, Shymalan points his camera at a stationary paper cup. "Okay," I see him saying, "the alien breaks in--cut to the cup! The cup is NOT MOVING!! The cup is ABSOLUTELY STILL! There is NO MOVEMENT from the cup!"
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
That depends. Are you a masochist?
