Signs

Masterfully crafted atmosphere, excellent direction and cinematography. The screenplay could be better, but by far the most annoying aspect is the excessive and fervently presented references that don’t leave the viewer opportunity to insert their own ingredients, but must unquestionably accept the director's. Some of them are at least quesionable. Otherwise, it is excellent filmmaking. (02/09/2014)

I’ll start with the good things. I liked how Shyamalan used the girl's obsession with water and Merrill's baseball ability to "swing hard" at the end. Both, seemingly unrelated to the plot, resulted in a successful twist. It’s also true that some scenes are brilliantly shot and lethally tense, Shyamalan really knows how to “polish a turd”. And now the worse: Shyamalan tries to tackle a lot of issues, like the question of faith, parenthood and on so forth. It disrupts the coherence of the plot and often gets boring even. Some scenes (a wannabe emotionally tense scene with the prayer before a meal, the dialogue with the dying wife) seem terribly unnatural. Shyamalan, as a devout Catholic, solves his own problems, he is not very good at psychology and the result is a strange mess – something between a psychological film and a pure horror movie. Those two things don’t fit together and things end up falling apart. (05/18/2003)

I noticed something interesting - those who rate Signs very highly often have great reservations about The Village. For me, it's the opposite. While I consider The Village to be M. Night Shyamalan's masterpiece, I not only disliked Signs, but it disgusted me. That's because the film touches on a genre that I like very much, and I know quite a lot about it. However, it does so in a very superficial way, using ideas from B-movies of the 1950s. Its portrayal of aliens and the risks associated with them made me laugh in the movie theater. In that case, any attempt at a "thriller" and "horror" is doomed to failure. Where others talk about the "great atmosphere and mystique," I sometimes felt like the director was openly making fun of me. Signs does not work as a psychological film for various reasons. What remains is the traditionally good work with actors, and the children acted very decently, while Gibson delivered his standard performance, he did not suit his role in my eye. He looks much better in action roles. Shyamalan is very good at working with details and sounds, but this time it wasn't enough to create the good atmosphere that his filmmaking stands for, due to the poorly chosen approach to the subject. In particular, the incorporation of religious elements into the story really didn't sit well with me. Overall impression 40%. (06/13/2006)

An above-average thriller (a variation of Independence Day) in the typical chatty style of Shyalaman that generates an unsettling atmosphere from the beginning to the end, where things fall considerably apart due to the not very good look of the aliens. Mel Gibson carries the film on his shoulders, he hardly ever leaves the screen. Signs doesn’t get a full score mostly because of the ending, which is way too American and doesn’t fit the film’s atmosphere. (12/30/2007)

Can humor go hand in hand with slowly built suspense and a thick, disconcerting atmosphere? Can you combine a sci-fi movie about invasion with questions of faith and destiny? Isn’t there an unwritten rule that “the dog never dies"? If Shyamalan had come up with this concept a decade later, everybody would have laughed at him. But he came up with it at a time when he was unarguably still at his creative zenith and managed to concentrate his talents on making one of the top thrillers of the beginning of the twenty-first century. It has just one weak spot: the very end when he proves once and for all whether or not he was one of those people who believes/hopes that everything happens for a specific reason. I’m not one of them and so in such a well-thought out movie, which to a certain extent Signs is, I felt that the ending (but not necessarily the overall message) was really unsatisfying and, to a certain extent, cheap. If it had been less ambitious and made do with just three (?) days of the first contact through the eyes of a regular family, it would have been more than enough for a good movie. (11/20/2003)