Signs: Entertaining but only to some extent

At my age – and given my size – I have to admit that I still get goose bumps over ghost stories. In fact, every time I watch horror films, I sometimes have difficulty sleeping at night – especially when the ghostly images in the movie keep recurring in my mind at bedtime.

Tales about creatures from outer space, however, do not scare me – no, not even when I was still a kid. And not even the most grotesque-looking alien figure from the Hollywood factory ever frightened me.

But days before the opening day to Manila of the movie Signs – which is about an alien invasion – I still braced myself for some restless nights that would follow after watching the film because its director, M. Night Shyamalan, was also the creator of The Sixth Sense, which I consider to be among the scariest in my list of horror flicks.

Signs casts Mel Gibson as a former minister who loses his faith in God after his wife dies in a freak road accident. With the help of his younger brother, Joaquin Phoenix, he raises his two kids played by Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin, in a farm in Pennsylvania. One morning, he and his kids wake up to the puzzling sight of crop circles in the middle of their cornfield. This is when their nightmare begins.

Right in the beginning of the film, the director already tries to establish an atmosphere of eeriness that’s supposed to make your hair stand on its end. But this doesn’t happen. Instead, you end up pulling your hair out of sheer boredom because the film takes so long in its exposition of the events that later unfold in the story.

Actually, there’s a blurb on the print layout of this film quoting Clay Smith of Access Hollywood who supposedly said this about the movie: "You won’t just be on the edge of your seat... You’ll be jumping out of it!" Well, I totally agree with what Clay Smith said about Signs. You’ll really jump out of your seat – but straight into the exit out of frustration.

The movie is really quite slow, slower than EDSA traffic during rush hour – particularly in the film’s early part. Not even the Bernard Hermann-like music (Psycho) that was used here in Signs succeeds in adding excitement to the film’s first half.

And I don’t know if it’s the Asian in me that can’t relate to the film’s subject: the appearance of the mysterious crop circles. Signs probably became a big hit in the United States because they are familiar with crop circle sightings there. But not in this part of the world.

Now, Signs isn’t really a bad film. For one thing, you see some creative touches by the director here and there (like the image of the alien reflecting on the TV screen – which startles the audience a bit). And there are the fine performances of Joaquin Phoenix and the child actors. (Mel Gibson’s performance, although not really bad, could still have been improved).

To the viewer’s great relief, the movie also starts shaping up and stirs some excitement when the aliens finally make their presence toward the film’s second half.

Sadly, not even the gripping face-to-face confrontation of the major characters with the alien toward the end can make up for the over-all inferior quality of the film’s story.

I think the problem with Signs is that the director tries to pad Mel Gibson’s film persona with layers and layers of angst (the root of which was the death of his wife) so that it doesn’t look like a cardboard character – and this is good. Very good, in fact. The trouble is, this is basically a science-fiction (although it tries to pass itself off as horror in most parts) and it’s quite difficult to combine angst and special effects in a film – unless, of course, the director is extremely brilliant, which Shyamalan obviously is not... at least based on what we see here in Signs.

Shyamalan, in fact, doesn’t even use special effects here – so don’t expect this to be another Independence Day. In its place are religious overtones that are way, way over – to the point that the whole thing already sounds like a two-hour homily.

Sure, I appreciate the way the director injects faith into this film, but then, even the most overzealous among priests knows when to stop the sermon during Sunday Mass. But not the director of the film, who should have spent more time instead checking on one gaping loophole in his script.

In the story, aliens are supposed to be scared of water. Now, considering that aliens are supposed to be intelligent forms with sophisticated gadgets, why weren’t they able to detect the fact that the earth is three-fourths water?

But really, in spite of all the negative aspects I pointed out here, I still cannot categorically say that Signs is an out-and-out bad film. Actually, it is entertaining to some extent. Maybe I just expected too much out of the film and got disappointed.

But then, since Shyamalan’s second film outing, Unbreakable, already turned out to be a disaster, maybe I should have seen the sign.