My Review of "Signs"

Signs came out back in 2002. It was probably at the height of M. Night Shyamalan's popularity in the early 2000's. I have to say I was one of the few people that actually really liked this movie when it first came out. There was a lot to like it and I was curious if I would have the same reaction watching this movie almost 20 years later.

The movie starts out mysteriously as did all Shyamalan movies back in the day. I knew what kind of movie I was getting myself into. We get introduced to Graham, the main protagonist. From first watching it you know there's more to his character than meets the eye. All we know is that he lives with his two kids and his younger brother Merrill.

The movie then unravels itself like an onion to explain why Graham and his family are so conflicted. It's revealed that the family is still in mourning after the sudden loss of the matriarchy of the family. I won't get into the details of her death but as you watch the movie you'll notice that each member of the family is dealing it in a different way. They could have focused on this to make a movie but they went into a different direction.

Seeing as this is a semi-horror movie there has to be a horror element to the movie. The movie isn't really an all out terrifying movie but it does have some pretty good creepy atmospheric moments. There's probably only 1 or 2 jump scare moments and they pass by pretty quick. In this movie the terror comes in the form of an alien invasion.

It's pretty fun and interesting that they added realistic human elements of an alien invasion. Most people believing the whole encounter being a hoax and scoffing at the reality of the situation. That's very believable as we see in real life with many of the problems we have today.

Some of you will want to watch it because it's an alien invasion story but there's more to this movie than that. The alien invasion is only a small part of the movie. Under the mask of an alien movie we have a story that talks about faith and determinism.

Graham was actually a reverend before the tragic accident of his wife. He lost his faith because of the horrific event. Again he is mourning so he has to take his time to really assess what's going on. There's a some talks throughout the movie asking what kind of person they are. He goes on to explain that there are people that have faith and there are people that believe some things are just the luck of the draw.

To add to Graham's confusion there are a number of foreshadowing queues that have him trying to figure out if things were really coincidental or were things placed in the right spot at the right moment. Seeing as this is a movie it's kind of dramatic irony for us to think about this.

I love how they're talking about this while I'm watching this on screen. To me as an audience member I can say yeah of course everything is meant to be, you're in a movie which was created by someone and I'm watching it. Then again when I look at it in an outward perspective this is what the writer had intended and then he played me as an audience member. M. Night Shyamalan stop messing with my head!

Watching this back in the day I probably didn't get a lot of these clues throughout the movie and watching it again 20 years later I'm starting to see this movie as a deeper movie than I expected. Was all of this intentional? Or is this just me over examining this movie?

Something I totally forgot was the way Shyamalan directed his actors to sit and talk in a very awkward monotone manner. I believe it was intentional to give the audience a slightly off feeling about the situation. This generally isn't done in a lot of movies but it was pretty signature Shyamalan work back in the day.

It's funny how I could enjoy this movie just as much as I enjoyed it back in the day. The special effects aren't the best and this movie could use a 4K transfer so that we can get rid of all that horrible graininess from the screen. Then again maybe the movie was meant to be grainy so that we can't see how bad the special effects are. They didn't even have that many special effects so I don't see why it would be a big deal. A lot of the action is really off screen and you kind of imagine what had happened.

Overall, I know people have a problem with this movie because some of the story telling isn't grounded in reality but it's a movie. It's story telling just get caught up in the characters. I had fun with this movie twenty years later which proves that this is a classic for me. I have to give this movie an 8 out of 10. There's more to this movie than meets the eye. There's a certain charm to it that you can't deny.