Signs of the times

The official patented Nosuch terse movie review of Signs: A dubious new-age message dipped into a hackneyed scare-flick coating which sleepwalks along with all the subtlety of a baseball bat.

You can read a more detailed bitch fest review of this piece of celluloid pablum if you don't mind spoilers.

Show me the spoiler-laden review, I don't mind spoilers.
WARNING: Spoilers ahead!
(If you had a browser which supported style sheets, you would have to click a link to see the part of the post with the spoilers. Since you do not, avert your eyes!)

Once upon a time, a minister, his minor league wash-out brother and his two children lived on a farm in Pennsylvania. The minister was actually no longer a minister, though. His deep belief in God and his commitment to serve the faithful has been shaken by a horrible senseless tragedy. You see, the minister's wife was killed when she was hit by a car.

This was too much for Graham Hess, the minister. There can be no God, you see, if you are a minister, and your wife gets hit by a car. In spite of all the grief, loss and suffering you would experience as a minister, it's okay when it's other people's suffering.

This is how deep Father Hess' belief ran: "My wife? That's it, I quit."

Perhaps this is the peril of earning a divinity degree from a correspondence school.

The family is a little odd. The Minister's brother Merrill held the record for the most home runs and the most strike outs in the minors. The little girl refuses to finish any glass of water, thus littering the house with half filled glasses. The little boy has asthma and is sensitive. If he sees dead people, he's keeping it to himself for now.

In the short six months since his wife's death at the hands of the director (no, I really mean it, the director plays the man who killed his wife), Graham Hess has shifted career gears quite dramatically, and is now a farmer with acres and acres of corn ready to be harvested. I guess farming isn't that hard for a single father and his brother to pick up.

All that corn is just too tempting for some Big Green Men, though. Even with their ability to navigate through the vast regions of space, Big Green Men sometimes need the alien equivalent of a "Rest Area" sign which can be read from orbit. It's of no concern to them that the local flora, that is, people, would notice these giant glyphs, because the Big Green Men know that people can't read Big Green Man language.

But even though earth people can't read the language, they can't help but notice all these "X" marks the spot crop doodles. The lucky Hess family gets one of these "Land Here / Good Eatin'" markers in their own field. Animals are spooked, as animals in movies always know when bad stuff is going to happen. Animals can smell foreshadowing a mile away, or two miles away in a Shyamalan flick.

That night, one of the Big Green Men plays some hide and seek with Hess in the corn fields, which are extra spooky at night. Especially when you only have the classic horror film flashlight. That's the one that goes out when you drop it, and doesn't light up again until you bang it. We see enough of a Big Green Man darting back into the corn to know that Big Green Men don't wear pants.

The next morning, we learn from some handy TV news that crop circles are popping up everywhere, all in one night. It's spooky. How could it be a hoax, since it happened in so many places in such a short time? It means something.

Since stuff involving space men and outer space is sort of complicated, we need to introduce a cheap, expositional device for people in the audience who might not get what's going on. Papa Hess takes his two spooky kids to the town bookstore. Conveniently enough, there's one last copy of "Space Alien Visitations for Dummies," which the Hess boy buys. We will frequently hear the boy reading from this book throughout the film, to explain the obvious.

Along the lines of being a sensitive brainy kid who can explain stuff, our Hess boy has taken to carrying around an old baby monitor receiver. On returning home from the book store, the baby monitor commences making odd noises.

The kid gives it one listen, makes a spooky face and says "I hear space people."

Even with the space people using FM to coordinate their plunder of the earth, since their language sounds like clicking and popping, we still can't be sure what they are up to, or even if it's really space people talking. But the kid is positive. Don't doubt a spooky kid.

Thanks to more convenient TV news that night, we learn the aliens are double parked in places all around the globe, right near the crop glyphs. Papa Hess and his brother stare at the TV news late into the night, where the alien ships are clearly shown as blinking, stationary lights (no expenses were spared on effects on this film). In this moment, the film reaches for it's deepest philosophical moment.

When his brother seeks comfort from the former minister, he instead gets a lecture about the two types of people in the world: those who believe everything happens for a reason, and those who think everything is just chance and randomness. Father Hess used to be the former, until his wife died for clearly no reason. Confronted with this, he opted for door number two. So Papa Hess has no comfort to offer.

The next morning, we learn the aliens have cloaking devices, which hide their ships from view. Apparently they either don't work at night, or they forgot to turn them on the night before. Aliens are spooky that way.

Why are they here? What could they want? Let's turn to page 92 of the book the kid got, and find out. According to "Space Alien Visitations for Dummies" the kids reads aloud for the audience that the aliens could either be "friendly" or "hostile." This clears up much.

The question is asked "And if they're hostile, what will that mean, oh wise and great book?"

And the book of Aliens sayeth to us: "They'll attack and invade!" Aliens and spaceships and crop circles, oh my!

So now the menace is set up. It's pretty clear the Big Green Men are up to no good. If no other reason than dogs bark a lot. Remember: animals know.

Seeing as he's sitting right next to a big "Invade HERE" sign, Hess does the only thing he can do against a pending alien onslaught. He gets a bunch of boards and nails, and seals his house up. Frankly, I'd invest in putting distance between me and the crop circle, but what do I know? Here's a man who supposedly lost his faith, but he's about to put his whole family on the line with his belief in lumber.

It is hard to say what is more incredible: the someone would think you could board up a house against a race of creatures who can travel through outer space, or that it would actually work.

It turns out that Hess was right to put his faith in wood. Just because aliens have interstellar travel doesn't mean they'll have invented weapons, or even a crowbar. The alien invasion turns out to be about as dangerous as a gang of roving 12 year olds. All they do is tap on windows and rattle door knobs. A locked door or a boarded up window is complete protection.

When the Hess family is finally holed up in the cellar, with the door secured with an axe handle, they have found sanctuary. After one false alarm with a sneaky alien trying to get in the coal chute (nothing that a pile of furniture and some feed bags can't fix), they call it a night.

Might as well get some sleep, since come morning, the aliens are hightailing it out of dodge. Turns out they came for some fresh space-meat or something, and just grabbed a few people. They would have probably stayed, but it turns out the aliens dissolve when wet. And wouldn't you know it, our planet has lots of water on it! I guess that caught the spacemen by surprise!

Perhaps the conversation on board the spaceship went like this:

MLEPNIX: Hey, what's all this blue stuff?

QRTDX: Don't worry about it. The two legged erect primates are good eating.

MLEPNIX: Isn't there lots of water here? Maybe we should just get take out.

QRTDX: Okay, so there's some water. But we can just run down, grab a few humans for a snack, and be out in no time. It will give us a chance to use our special human poison. You know, from that duct in your hand.

MLEPNIX: Oh, that's what that is for. I wondered about that. Still, with all the water around, maybe we should be careful, and put on some protective clothing.

QRTDX: Well, we could, but our scientists have no time to make raincoats, since we're still stuck on the crowbar problem.

MLEPNIX: Lazy fuckers. If they could just figure out agriculture, maybe we wouldn't have to go from planet to planet looking for dinner.

The Hess family is spared from being turned into human-kabobs. But there's still that one last cheap movie thrill to be had, and the real message of the movie has to be trotted out too. We all know it can't just be about hungry, stupid green men from another planet.

Bravely coming up from the cellar, only because the brainy kid needs his asthma medication and is unconscious and on the brink of death, we discover a Big Green Man is in the house. He gets the jump on our dimwitted family, and scoops up the unconscious kid.

What to do? What to do? The Big Green Man stands there, being as menacing as a naked, green extraterrestrial holding a kid can be. And then, oh no, he waves his poison palm over the poor kid.

Ex-Father Hess and his brother stand there watching this, and in case you happened to be in the toilet during the critical scene, we're treated to a flashback of the conversation between Father Hess and his brother. The deep philosophical one about the two kinds of people. I'm glad the director showed some restraint and opted not to flash "THIS IS THE MESSAGE OF THE FILM" over the flashback, because then he'd really be hitting us over the head with it.

And Hess remembers his wife's dying words. The ones which seemed meaningless at the time. Just a random firing of neurons. "Tell Merrill to swing away." Hess always thought she was talking about Merrill playing baseball, which seemed really meaningless and godless. It turns out she was seeing the future, because Merrill's record-setting bat is hanging up behind Merrill in the room where they confront the alien.

Papa Hess tells his brother to beat some alien butt with the baseball bat. With the first whooping, the Big Green Man drops his kid-snack, which Dad grabs and runs outside. Now Big Green Men cannot be destroyed with a bat whooping, but you can bunt them around the house a bit. In doing so, you're bound to bop them right into a bunch of half-filled glasses of water. And the water will make the alien all melty. Thank goodness for all those glasses of water!

The little boy who had faced the alien poison palm is fine after a quick shot of medicine from Dad, because the asthma protected him from the poison.

And Father Hess suddenly realizes that Everything Has A Purpose. If it were not for his wife getting killed and having visions of the future, and his little girl not finishing the water, and his kid having asthma, and his brother playing baseball, the space aliens might have nabbed his son!

God does indeed work in mysterious ways. Though it seems what He is saying is that there is no free will, only destiny. And frankly, that makes for a very dull story. Because in the end, what Hess did or did not believe made no difference to anything. And I don't know what is a more disturbing message for a film, that there is no meaning other than what we choose, or that there's a higher power who sets up circumstances in our lives that play out like a giant version of the board game "Mousetrap."

The idea that the aliens managed to grab a bunch of other people to make their human-pot-pies out of doesn't cause Hess to wonder about a God who would do such a thing. After all, that same God set up a bunch of dominos which saved his kid in the end. Therefore, life has meaning. And besides, those other people were probably heathens anyway. Those kind deserve to be eaten. At least Hess is consistently shallow.

I don't expect every film to be high art, honest. Spiderman, which was hardly a memorable movie was at least entertaining, even if the direction was frequently flat. Admittedly, the bar is lower with a comic book movie, but not that much lower than with a film like Signs. And it's not some issue I have with M. Night Shyamalan. I enjoyed the Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. While neither was a great film, both at least contained some cleverness, and some engaging, subtle performances. They had a charm. That can be enough for me.

But I won't kid you either, I am becoming more of a movie snob in my old age. Signs was not Minority-Report-bad. I wasn't rolling my eyes over and over and groaning out loud like I did at Spielberg's latest piece of cinema-excrement. Signs was a head shaker and a yawn. Just because Shyamalan doesn't make frantic, fast-cut, explosion-filled Bruckheimer drek doesn't make him Hitchcock. Slow pacing should not automatically be considered subtle story telling.
posted 10:30 PM | link |