Signs 
Signs: Review
Saturday 02.08.2003
alice ttlg || 11:20 PM || trackback
M. Night Shyamalan is truly amazing. This makes three for three, all his movies are in my top ten. Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and now this one, Signs.
But it's best not to know what his movies are about before you see them, I think. If someone tells you the basics, they sound ordinary, uninteresting, been done a thousand times before or worse, it can sound silly. If someone had described the plot of Unbreakable to me, I never would have gone to see it, but his skill lies in finding a new way to tell it, to take the ordinary or even the laughable plot and make it real, make it believable and add a new dimension, to make us see it from a different angle.
I was alternately interested, curious, laughing, scared, frightened, touched, amazed, terrified and in tears throughout this movie, a rollercoaster ride, it starts off slowly, building up as it goes and the next thing you know, you're sucked in.
What I really love about his movies is that you get to the end of them and there's so much left to think about, he never really explains it all, he paints a picture, an idea, a thought and then leaves it up to us to ponder it. He shows us some part of our lives, of our social mythology, our fantasies, thru a different lens, and then leaves us alone to stare at it for awhile. What if there are ghosts? What if we could help them? What if there are superheroes? And supervillains? Can we save the world? Do you believe in miracles, portents, signs? Or is it all just random chance?
It's also amazing the performances he gets out of the actors in his movies. He writes and directs and he gets these wonderfully understated and yet very emotional performances out of the actors, Bruce Willis was amazing in both Sixth Sense and Unbreakable and Mel Gibson is terrific in this too. Shyamalan goes for a quietness in the actors, but it's not dry or stiff, there's emotion and a certain deliberateness that makes all the difference.
So go rent this movie! or catch it on PPV! Make some popcorn and settle in to see a great show and then talk about it with all your friends! :)
...there be spoilers below...
I thought Spielberg's Taken miniseries was bad, but now that I've seen this movie, Taken really stinks. Signs is how Taken should have been, it hit all the right notes, the disbelief, the sitting around the TV, hiding in the closet to watch, watching the shot of the alien over and over and more. And the aliens were far scarier here in this movie, never seeing them much, only in bits and pieces, in clawing hands under doors and thru grates and shadows at the boarded up window, in reflection in the TV tube, thru the shards of glass in a broken window from a child's vantage point. At times, the movie was both a parody of all the alien abduction movies and TV shows and then it was also more realistic than any of them ever have been.
But Signs goes beyond all the alien stuff, he uses aliens like he did ghosts in Sixth Sense and comic books in Unbreakable, as a springboard to talk about how and why our lives happen. Chance? Coincidence? Purpose? Fate? Destiny? And he's never foolish enough to try to dictate one or the other, while the characters in the movies may reach one conclusion or the other, he still leaves it open for the viewer to disagree, to see it differently.
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