Review of Signs (2002) by Dawdlingpoet — 25 Nov 2021

Signs is a suspenseful science fiction thriller, brought to you by the director of other similar movies like the Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and The Village, M. Night Shyamalan.

This movie has some of the usual elements of his other movies, although one thing thats slightly different is that your shown more, visually, at certain points towards the end of the movie mostly, of the aliens or presence there, though even then its mainly just glimpses.

It is a very atmospheric and absorbing movies and the cast do well at sucking you in, making you believe what they think their seeing and experiencing. In that way, its very cleverly done, given as soon as you think it through, its pretty clearly a prepostorous (sp?) situation, with talk of the end of the world being discussed on the TV, while little appears to be actually happening in the families home or nearby.

As is even mentioned during the movie, its quite like War of the World, only with much less action and its slower paced but it has the same 'end of the world' theme.

By the time the finale, as it were, the alien creastures arriving at the Hess family home comes, I'd become so intrigued and compelled to see what would happen, the movie had worked in sucking me into this rather paranoid world, where the world seems to be under attack.

I noticed that there were points, mainly towards the end, where the camera would seemingly look away, show a different angle so you couldn't see for sure what was happening. Showing, for example, the torch on the ground and hearing and seeing footsteps and noise but nothing else, its a little like the Blair Witch Project, at the end of that movie, how the camera showed the final scene, it sort of reminded me of that.

There is quite a touching scene at one point between Mel's character, Graham and his son Morgan, which is touching and kind of upsetting too, although it could also be seen as being a bit over the top and melodramatic to some. Also I think the ending may disappoint some, in that at the end I did think it was pretty anti-climactic. However, it didn't disappoint me like the ending to 'Next' did, for some reason, so it could be worse!

This film is similar in some aspects to both The War of the Worlds and to The Blair Witch Project, I felt. While it does spoil things to some extent in how much it shows you these alien beings right at the very end, little is shown up until then and its all very suggestive in terms of what may be out there and going on, until then, so in that respect its similar to both The Blair Witch Project and to M. Night Shyamalans' other movies. When the aliens are shown in quite a close up way, I did find this a bit disappointing, what was shown just seemed a bit silly I suppose, after all the build up to it.