So I finally got to see my second-most anticipated film of 2002 (the first was The Two Towers, naturally), M. Night Shyamalan's Signs. This was a huge disappointment, coming from the director of the excellent The Sixth Sense and the very good Unbreakable.
Mel Gibson -- showing his age, and shot from a much higher angle than he is ordinarily, making him look like the short fellow that he really is -- plays a Catholic deacon of some sort who has lost his faith after his wife's death. The film starts with him puttering about on his farm, his two kids (cut from the same cloth as that "I see dead people" kid whose name escapes me right now), and his dour brother (played by Joaquin Phoenix). The dog starts barking. He goes off into his field and finds the crop circles. Actually, this is all in the previews, so everyone knows the beginning by now.
What is ostensibly an alien-invasion film turns out to be more of a "meditation" on faith and belief. That's fine. But even Close Encounters of the Third Kind handled this theme so much better, as Shyamalan simply clomps around with it. It's a bit of a mess: it's part Field of Dreams, part Night of the Living Dead; there's a Bernard Herrmannesque theme for the opening credits, and the deadpan jocularity of The X-Files running all throughout.
The real heavy-handedness comes in when Gibson sets it up midway -- in fact, Shyamalan gives the goods away very, very early -- when he tells Phoenix something to the effect that there are two kinds of people: those who believe in signs (that things happen for a reason), and those who think it's sheer coincidence. (Surely there's room for skepticism somewhere there?) Simply put, are there really such things as coincidences?
This would be fine as the movie's core question for the viewer to ponder -- but the "coincidences" are, alas, so clumsily stacked on top of one another that the conclusion looms too clearly for us. (And does one really need quick flashbacks to events that happened ten minutes before?) The seams are showing in the way Shyamalan structures his screenplays, unfortunately,and by the time we get to the ending the thrill is gone. And indeed, seen in the context of his two previous films, it's clear that the higher power here is Shyamalan himself.
Posted by the wily filipino at February 19, 2003 01:29 PM