Signs
I'll try to be as spoiler-free as possible. Mel Gibson stars as a former minister who finds crop circles in the middle of his field. Predictably, his family, two kids and his brother, is freaked out. Soon, through the magic of television, they found out similar circles are being seen throughout the world, mainly India and Mexico. What follows is a sequence of events leading up to an invasion by unknown aliens.

Director M. Night Shyamalan has only made two movies before. Now all three follow his distinctive style of focusing on single objects in the picture, studying them, and moving on as if they were pieces to a puzzle. The Sixth Sense was his best effort at this because I was just blown away by the ending the first time I saw it. Unbreakable worked on a lesser extent but the revelation that Samuel L. Jackson played the villain justified doing it. In Signs, there really isn't any payoff to paying attention. It's basically all laid out there, as any traditional movie would. Sure, he does have flashbacks at the end but you have the feeling of what they're going to do instead of being totally surprised.

Also, when Shyamalan does this "focused directing," it makes things awfully S-L-O-W. It gets frustrating sometimes, more so in the beginning when they were setting up the story. As the movie progressed, there were some frights and the movie got more exciting.

Lots of questions remain unanswered pertaining to these aliens. Because Shymalan chooses to focus in on a house of people watching CNN, we'll never get to know, making it a missed opportunity. Curiousity drives the human race and it would have been satisfying to find out what these aliens wanted but again we never find out.

Now about that ending. In Unbreakable, its main characters had an Achilles Heel. It's no different for these aliens. What it is in this movie is so dumb, I thought Mars Attacks' lousy music as a way to defeat those aliens was just as plausible.

The movie does frighten and it is suspenseful but I think it's unsatisfying, especially compared to the caliber of films Shyamalan has made and is capable of making. 2.5 stars