Total crap, an utter waste of time. The surface action is dumb and the deeper message is dumber. SPOILER ALERT
Many reviewers here complained about the ridiculous plot holes and I agree. It's full of holes.
I see a lot of movies and I will walk if it looks lousy. There's 20+ movies to choose from, why waste time on a lousy one? If I hear lame dialog, a trite or cliche script, if I roll my eyes more than twice, I'm outta there. If the writer and director are lousy, they're not going to get any better. An exception to this is when they hire another writer or director after firing the lame one. An example of this is "The Muppets Take Manhattan," where the first half is lousy, but the second half is good and even great in some parts.
I walked on "Signs" after about 40 minutes and didn't look back. However, a family member insisted that it was good and all came together in the end, so I went back and watched the entire movie, start to end. Boy was I sorry, I should have stayed away.
The movie is ridiculous on various levels, but besides that, it has nothing worthwhile to offer.
As soon as the aliens came into the story, I was able to accurately predict the entire story: Aliens may or may not be here. As the movie progresses, the evidence of the aliens becomes more pronounced until we begin to see glimpses of them. From there we will go into the climax where we have a showdown with the aliens and win. That's a synopsis of the plot and who, I mean who, is going to say there is anything at all original about that? No one over the age of 13.
The movie plays out just as I predicted. But there's some quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo thrown in there that's really the point of the story. Fine, the only problem is that the mumbo-jumbo is so utterly ridiculous that it's laughable.
Unless I'm missing something (unlikely), the plot is this: God causes Gibson's wife to get horribly injured in an accident where she suffers in agony until Gibson can get there, whereupon she delivers a coded message from God to Gibson, without Gibson realizing it, and then she dies. This accident causes Gibson to lose his faith in God. Meanwhile, God has caused another family member that is a budding baseball star to suffer an injury and his career and life are ruined. Then, God causes the kid to have asthma and an irrational preoccupation with water, resulting in half glasses of water being left all over the house. Then, God causes all these circumstances to work together during an alien invasion of earth such that the coded message, the asthma, the water, and the sports career work together to defeat the aliens in the house and save lives. Gibson sees how God has wrought all of this and regains his faith. If that's it, that's the most utterly ridiculous, blasphemous, lame, contrived, etc story I've ever heard of.
So I'm wondering two things: 1: Is my understanding of the story complete and my laughter is justified, or did I miss something? And 2: How on earth did the guy that wrote the brilliant "The 6th Sense" write this load of tripe? It would seem that his contract with the movie studio includes a "right of subcontract" and he subcontracted his swimming pool cleaning guy to write this.
M. Night's best M. Night Shyamalan seems to have lost his way a bit with his last few movies. Though not awful, IMO they just don't measure up to this one or to The Sixth Sense. I actually like Signs and the Sixth Sense pretty equally, but seem to have gravited to this one more for re-viewing. Unbreakable is also quite good. Hopefully he still has some surprises for us. We need original and creative people like him. We have more than enough copying and mindless crap released. We need more of what the early M. Night was doing.
The second best UFO/alien story on film. M Night does a great job with this story. The cast plays the part with conviction.
Good movie. Good disc. The polarization of opinions concerning director M. Night Shyamalan should not keep you from giving this Blu-ray a chance. I won't argue that this movie is the finest Shyamalan has to offer, but I will tell you that for its fans and those who enjoy a well-crafted thriller Signs is a good Blu-ray disc. Incorporating all the extras from the DVD, Signs on Blu-ray eclipses its legacy counterpart. Those who can make use of its uncompressed PCM audio track will enjoy a step up from the Dolby Digital of the standard definition disc. The video, while not the best example of what Blu-ray can do, is a faithful representation of the source material. This is a good movie, and a good disc; just arguably not a must-buy if you own the dvd.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
![Signs [Blu-ray]](http://www.worldfamouscomics.com/shopping/largeimage/?back=B0016CP2O0&image=http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51GOrjEFH-L.jpg&title=Signs+%5BBlu-ray%5D)
