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In 1999, pretty much out of nowhere, M. Night Shyamalan hit the American movie scene with the kind of blinding flash that does not appear often in Hollywood. Super-hit movies come along with regularity, but not usually by boy wonders, and not since the days of Spielberg and Lucas has anyone splashed quite so large as Shyamalan. At age 29, he wrote and directed 1999's huge surprise, The Sixth Sense, a pretty low-budget word-of-mouth film that made about a quarter of a billion dollars in pure profit, outdone only by the original Star Wars. And that was just in the theaters stateside. Full-grown, well-educated adults went to see the film, an elegant and very creepy ghost story, over and over again, even talking it up to innocent bystanders in places like church.
In 2001 came the much-anticipated Unbreakable, again written as well as directed by Shyamalan and starring two of Hollywood's biggest actors, Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis (Willis had the lead role in The Sixth Sense). Unbreakable was also eerie, albeit only moderately, the story of a middle-aged security guard who comes to the realization that he is, in fact, to his astonishment, a comic-book style superhero, "Security Man" or something like that. Slow and a bit clunky, and the miscasting of Jackson, did not help the film, but a lot of people still went to see it (almost $100 million in domestic box-office alone) simply because it was made by the fellow who did The Sixth Sense. And now Signs.
Premise: An ex-Episcopal priest who lost his faith when his wife died regains it in the midst of a global attack by aliens. Humans know something strange is afoot because numerous large and elaborate crop circles are showing up simultaneously all around the globe—for instance, in the priest-turned-farmer's cornfields in Bucks County, Pennsylvania (45 miles from Philadelphia, the director's hometown, in which he determinedly still lives). For the befuddled earthlings, the circles are "signs" of some sort, portents of strange things to come, like the end of the world. For the aliens, they are simply and only signs, navigational markers for their impending invasion.
Of course, viewers don't learn all of this till far into the film, and that slow road to knowledge makes for a good deal of suspense, stoked by isolation: virtually the entire story takes place on the ex-minister's farm. He and his family are alone, although they can count on the ready compassion of the local female sheriff's deputy (played wonderfully by Cherry Jones). Besides father Graham Hess (Mel Gibson), there are his two young children, ten-year-old son Morgan (Rory Culkin) and five-year-old daughter Bo (Abigail Breslin), and Graham's younger brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), a washed-up baseball slugger who's moved in with the widower to help raise the kids.
Ex-priest Hess is neither particularly intellectual nor talkative, but he does care intensely about people, especially his family. When his wife, Colleen, died gruesomely in a freakish auto accident, the utter meaninglessness of the tragedy shredded his faith. The vicious caprice of the event was aggravated by the silliness of her last words (shown in flashback), the punch line—so it seems—to a cruel cosmic joke. When the very hostile alien invasion gets up close and personal, Hess half prays to and half defies the God he no longer believes: please, don't take my children, too.
So does the loving God above make things work for the good of his people, or is he just like those venomous aliens, also from the sky, who come to prey? The answer is spelled out at the very end of the story, when Colleen's grotesquely incongruous parting words turn out to be efficacious signs, providing the means to extricate the family from the alien peril. Wow, and pazaam. That death was no accident; wife died to save family, although by a means no one would ever have foreseen. In fact, most of the hard things in Hess's life turn out to be "for the good."
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