Little green men are creeping on Mel Gibson’s family, and they do not come in peace.
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Then you are ready to talk aboutSigns.
Instead it’s justMel Gibsonin a corn field, staring at crop circles.
He’d like to believe it’s a dumb prank, just troublemakers from the next farm over.
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But the kids sense something else, and soon it’s all over the news.
We even get tinfoil hats!
This is realRod Serlingstuff.
But Josh, you tell me, were you a Shyama-man at the time?
And how does all it hold up for you in 2022?
), and so he became progressively less interesting to me.
So much strident insisting on things we can’t see, so much somberness.
Some characters are good at this, while others are just pretenders.
Shyamalan, on the other hand, just wants to go for the boo!
of the jump scares.
His movie is basically a reification of 1950s-style American toughness: us versus them, fighting against invaders.
That wouldn’t happen now.)
In the era of Bush II, this made dark sense.
Even at the film’s release, I called it “terrorized genuflecting.”
I’m curious, Leah, did the movie put you back in that traumatized moment?
Or does its distance make it feel more like a freestanding artifact?
But it does give the movie an aura of magical thinking that doesn’t exactly stand up to scrutiny.
Sorry suckers, you should have hadyour own Breslin!
Today though, it definitely feels like an artifact of the era, almost Americana kitsch.
Or does it even make sense to dig too much into the acting on this one?
I do find it mind-boggling that Shyamalanwas apparently shootingaround the time of 9/11 and production continued afterward.
Perhaps the idea of reclaiming one’s inner faith was a comfort at the time.
It’s the kind of script it’s possible for you to read almost anything into.
He’s even patient withMerritt Wever’s pharmacy drama queen.
There’s not enoughCherry Joneshere she was born to play a cool-headed sheriff but is there ever?
It’s a fail that she disappears after a while.
That feels like money left on the table.
They don’t feel like real kids, just surrogates for the filmmaker.
In a film likeSigns, they make the whole thing feel retrograde.
Even Phoenix gets to find his higher purpose (is it the military?
or “swinging away”?
).Signsis the best movie of 1951.
And still, it comes from a place of confidence, before Shyamalan’s steep decline.
He wasn’t that guy with the twist endings yet, not to my memory.
He was just a gifted Spielberg disciple making a scarier, shallowerClose Encounters.
I hope that Peele is studying his career closely.
Read past 2002 rewatches:
