Thriller and Comedy

Signs

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Starring: Mal Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, Abigail Breslin, and featuring M. Night Shyamalan

MPAA: Rated PG-13 for some frightening moments.

A tense thriller with a surprisingly humorous and witty script, Signs is a film for both Sci-Fi junkies and family film lovers. M. Night Shyamalan knows how to write and direct real tension and drama; and in Signs he uses these skills, along with a script that rivals a good comedy, and weaves a story so creatively it is okay that we have seen it in a hundred other movies.

While Will Smith is out blowing up Aliens, the Hess family is in rural Pennsylvania trying to catch the news and figure out what is the deal with the crop circles popping up all over the world. We see lights on the TV and news reports, but we never seem to catch a clear look at the invaders, and 90% of the film leaves us wondering if it isn’t a big hoax. The tension is shown through the eyes of a ten-year-old kid, his 6 year-old sister. They are scared and believe aliens are invading. The panic stricken Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) sits in the closet watching the TV, his ace white as a ghost. Graham (Mel Gibson) has rejected his position as a reverend and the existence of God because of the death of his wife six month earlier.



The four are a great family on screen. There are tears and smiles, and plenty of laughs. Gibson walks into the house at one time to see Phoenix and the kids sitting on a couch with tin foil fats wrapped around their heads to keep the aliens from reading their minds, and I went into hysteric laughing so hard. It was great. The dialogue between the two brothers is great, and we have no problem believing Gibson is Phoenix’s big brother. They have great chemistry, and the kids thrown into the mix make for a great family suffering from the death of a mother and now living in the horrible reality of an alien attack.



M. Night Shyamalan really put together a great story here. He used interesting angles in his cinematography to emphasize the eerie aura of the film. One angle that was used a lot, and very effectively, was a head on straight shot; usually it was a medium wide shot, and he used it a lot in the film. It was very basic and very effective in telling the story. To balance the creepy feeling ever present in the film he uses cute kids and great characters with an even better script to tell an almost horror tale. This is not a movie you can stop half way through to do homework. It is a movie that keeps you riveted to the screen, wondering if there are aliens or not, and if there are, what does it all mean?



I really can’t believe I pushed this film off eight years before seeing it. I enjoyed it, and I’d give it a solid 7.8 out of ten. It does remind me a bit of K-Pax because it raises so many questions and gives the audience a far more human and realistic view on what would happen if there really were aliens. I enjoyed Signs and would recommend it to the Sci-Fi nerds and the moms watching Hallmark dramas. There is something for everyone here.

Sex/Nudity – 0 out of 10 – a man talks about kissing a woman and a man talks about having beautiful women licking his feat – in a hypothetical situation.

Violence/ Gore – A woman is said to have been cut in half by a car crash. A police officer tells a man fairly graphically about the accident. Man chops off fingers from a hand that reaches out for him under a door jam. A dog is seen laying on the ground stabbed with a BBQ fork, there is a little blood. There are a lot of frightening scenes, a man is chased in a corn field in a scene of high tension, many scary hands are seen grabbing at people, there is a lot of tension of fright in the film.

Profanity – 4 out of 10 – A few uses of the “B” and “S” word, some name calling and one or two religious exclamations.