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Signs (Vista Series)

Signs (Vista Series)

List Price: $14.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: signs of a poor director.
Review: I was unable to believe this video, poor in many way, even Mel was acting uptied, the end was horse manor, predictable in any possible way, the director wanted to teach where India was, (the only country shown in the movie),where the signs were happening?. The director wanted to be the new Alfred? he directs, acts, and I was expecting that he performed as the alien too. This movie if you are new to Sci-fi and you are younger than 13 years old, you Probably will enjoy. If you are a Sci-Fi hack, you would be bored to death. The end of the movie smell like a out house, I got the impression this people ended the movie because it must have an end. This is the last movie I would buy and the first one if I have to give a present to my worst enemy. Needless to say I feel sorry because Mel was acting in it, and after the work he did in Patriot which it was excellent,got into such a poor film. Mel do you need money so badly? I am your fan and I hate to see you in a poor film. Don't buy this trash.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: ..but a fabulous movie poster!
Review: Again Nyan produces a filmic marvel, utliziing all the film noir that made Hitchcock so great. Just a pity the very heart and soul of the film is missing: the story. Where is it?

Phoenix and Gibson play...er...Phoenix and Gibson, the children are brats and the only character you feel even the vaguest sympathy for is the dog. (Forget the man in rubber who plays the alien - who last visited earth in the 50s for a few B Movie invasions at a matinee near you.)

This is an absolutely gutless B movie example of the genre.

Come on EVERYBODY, when are we all going to wake up to another flagrant example of Hollywood snatching our money for more hollow fodder, while only once in a blue moon giving us the 'real' alien invaders movies we all secretly want to watch. (cue:ID4).

I suppose Nyan could have spiced the whole thing up with a few Hindi song and dance numbers. At least that would have given the invaders a real reason to invade and kill off the earthlings.

Best thing about the movie...was the movie poster.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Decent if too cute, minimalist; off-the-mark faith storyline
Review: The writer/producer/director is certainly a gifted filmmaker but "Signs" is well short of what he is capable of. Plot follows Gibson, who plays a reverend whose wife died and who then gave up his faith, and family, who deal with life as hundreds of UFOs appear around the globe near crop signs, including Gibson's house. Focus is solely on Gibson and his two children and brother in their small town, with the torment of Gibson's faith running parallel with the main storyline of the uncertainty and fear accompanying the appearance of extraterrestrials.I found the reverend-at-conflict aspect unsatisfying. This is due at least in part to the director's full awareness of his target PG-13 rating, as what should be searing emotions of Gibson aren't really conveyed past the constant cuteness- tin-foil hats, group hugs, etc. At times a very creepy film, but comes off as less than what it should have been.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: there is no god
Review: I can only imagine that the writer/director intended this movie as a form of torture by demoralization, for the cast and audience. The thing about this movie is that it is so torturingly bad that one comes out the other end so demoralized as not to be able to think coherently, let alone deliver a bad review. The movie centers around a crisis of faith and, ironically, it engenders a crisis of faith in me, the viewer, whose faith in mankind is shaken to its core by the fact that anyone can have tolerated this movie. Not content with being thumpingly bad, the film also wallows in being far ickier than any of the preposterously crummy aliens we get a load of. Mel Gibson plays a Catholic priest, with a wife and children no less, who flakes out on his religious routine after his wife is killed in a car accident. We get to watch endless flashbacks of his wife's dying moments at the crash site. This is so tasteless as to be mind-boggling. It is as if this sort of thing is reasonable entertainment - something to take in while eating popcorn and taking down two big gulps that you smuggled into the theater from 7-11. Well, apparently Father Gibson's phony faith can't take much jostling and it comes down like the house of cards it is, with Mel saying that "there is no one watching out for us" as if religiousness were a matter of God performing favors for you and, if you come to find it hard to believe that this is going on, since things are not going your way, you lose all religious belief. Then, later in the movie, God seems to have woken up and started performing favors for Father Gibson again, and so he merrily dons his collar and whistles off to tend his flock again, presumably brimming with bonhomie about what a good sport God is and how recently God seems to have ensured that the tune-up given his SUV was extra-special. This kind of thing ensures that this movie plummets to such an abyss of moral depravity that by comparison Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is a masterwork.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A better Hitchcock than Hitchcock
Review: This movie is not for those who are looking for an Independance Day bang-em-up Sci-fi. I would not even classify it as a sci-fi flick. It is much more of a suspense/drama movie. Kept me at the edge of my seat for most of it. Shyamalan definately directs a movie that is though provoking.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Most Overrated Film of 2002
Review: It comes as no surprise that 'Signs' by M. Night Shyamalan became the fourth highest grossing film of 2002, making this blockbuster the director's most successful project to date. Favoring the creepy/suspenseful sci-fi genre once again, Shyamalan's previous two hits 'The Sixth Sense' and 'Unbreakable' made 'Signs' one of the most highly anticipated releases of the year. And just watch the six-part documentary that talks about the movie's marketing for further proof.

Shyamalan's third film delves into the question of 'Are aliens really out there? And how would we know?' He uses some interesting camera work and absence of background music in several scenes to set the mood for the mystery that is set to unravel itself. However, there are some parts in the film where he seems to use the same setup way too much. Another big pitfall in the film is the goofy comic relief that frequently cuts into the story. Humor is fine and everything, but put it in the wrong places and you have a film that chokes and slows itself down.

Let's not also forget the large gaps in logic! At the end of the film, a television news program reports that the aliens have all fled due to a secret weapon that was discovered by middle-easterners. The audience is then led to infer that the secret weapon is none only than - water! Sounds like Shyamalan couldn't think of a proper ending, so he made up something quick to give the film a conclusion. What I don't understand is how the aliens could have arrived on the planet to begin with, since our atmosphere has humidity in it and therefore is surrounded by water.

One last point, the film made itself even worse by actually revealing what the aliens looked like. It would have been much more suspenseful to have kept the extra-terrestrials hidden or running around briefly rather than to have had the camera fixate on a guy in a rubber alien suit. The alien's cartoonish appearance was almost.. laughable.

What I did enjoy about this film was its scenery and the use of lighting to create a mood. The crop circles looked like they were very difficult to create, and scenes like the chase around the crop field kept the audience guessing.

>>> 2 stars. This film just did not do it for me. I thought the acting was better than average, especially the performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Mel Gibson, but could not save the movie from its leaky plotline. All comparisons of Shyamalan to Hitchcock or Spielburg will have to wait. The man still has a long way to go. Hopefully, his next project will give the audience a film as gripping and genius as 'The Sixth Sense'.

- the enlightened one

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: No "Signs" of a Compelling Story
Review: ... Mel Gibson plays a former reverend who has lost his faith in God and is annoyed with having to constantly remind everyone not to call him "Father" anymore. The reason for his lapsed faith is the death of his wife in a car accident (I guess we are to assume that ministers pretty much think that they're exempt from human tragedy just because they're "men of God?"). The accident involves a guy played by the film's director, M. Night Shyamalan, which I found to be the most potent symbolism of the entire movie: Shyamalan does indeed drive this film into a car wreck.

Strange goings-on begin to occur at Reverend Mel's picture-perfect all-American rural Pennsylvania farmhouse (which, I kid you not, is actually painted in red, white and blue...do ya get the symbolism yet? Well if you don't, hold on, because for the remainder of the film, Shyamalan beats everything over your head like an escapee from a mental institution wielding an oversized sledgehammer). Mysterious giant crop circles suddenly begin to appear out in the back forty. A mysterious figure materializes one night outside of his little oh-so-cute-and-adorable-elfin-like daughter's bedroom window, whom he and his brother (Joaquin Phoenix) chase around the house. Mel later catches a glimpse of something alien-like taking a leisurely evening stroll through his cornfield.

Meanwhile, the TV news is broadcasting stories of an epidemic of crop circles all over the world; an array of strange lights appear over several major cities; an E.T. crashes a kid's birthday party in Brazil (hey, maybe he just wanted to take a shot at the piƱata?). OH MY GOD, THE ALIENS ARE COMING TO GET US!!!

There is constant overemoting, with virtually every main character breaking down into tears at some point or other, an obvious and transparent ploy to try to trick the audience into making an emotional investment in the characters' conflict; this in absence of a compelling plot.

This film left me sorely disappointed in Shyamalan as a writer and director, since his first two features-"The Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable"-showed so much promise. In both of those movies, he wisely chose that what is not said is far more powerful than what is said, and what the audience cannot see is far more disturbing than what they can see. If he continues to explore that theme-unseen powers brewing beneath the surface-he will create a compelling body of work that sets him apart from his contemporaries. "Signs," however, was quite obvious and out on top of the surface. If his goal was to create an entertaining science fiction tale with a compelling element of genuine human drama and something to say about the human condition, he should have rented "Donnie Darko" and taken some notes.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: This movie proves people see what they want
Review: Come on this move tries to sell the idea that a minister's wife gets killed so that he will loose his faith so that he can regain it by remembering her last words, so that he can meet the guy who ran over her, so that he can see an alien in the guys pantry so that he can hide his famlily in the basement, so that his sone can get an asma attack, so that he can survive the poison gas the alien shoots at him while the brother of the minister remember the last words of the wife to "swing away", so that he can hit the alien in the head with a baseball bat. . . . and so on and so on. It seems to me that the director had an idea the aline gets killed and worked back wards to make the movie. And another thing. . .did they pay mel gibson so much money that they only had about eight people in the cast, including the director? Who by the way sems to be there to contrive the stupid water weakness of the aliens. How can he know this and nobody in the scientific community? Well becuse he is the director and wrote this stupid movie.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: a disgrace for science fiction
Review: In my opinion, this movie is a disgrace for the sci-fi genre. Without doubt, it excels in creating suspence from the very beginning to the very end of the film by a skillful combination of camera work and sound. This might be a good thriller for those who like suspense without a plot - but what does the sci-fi content to do with it? If you think what this movie was about after you finished watching it, you realize that the plot is absolutely primitive, full of logical holes, lacks twist at the end and even does not show the classical for such films work of the mind of the heroes who, in traditional films, would at the end find the way how to defeat the evil. Here, the evil creatures are defeated purely by chance, and they did not even have a chance to prove that they are evil - they were assumed evil from the very beginning based on a book on aliens which the boy bought in a bookstore! All that the heroes do - hide deeper and deeper in their house. They do not fight back, and do not run, just hide and wait until the killing creatures (who did not kill anyone yet) will come after them, and this all works towards stronger and stronger suspense. Unfortunately, suspense is all this film is about. If so many people posted ...that they liked this mediocre film, then I am scared to think where the movie industry is headed to!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: At least it's got Mel Gibson ...
Review: Well, there are alien invasions, and then there are alien invasions - and as invasions go, this one has a LOT of problems. Turn off your brain, don't think too hard about why aliens are invading a planet that is 75% water (which they are apparently allergic to), and enjoy Mel. Certainly not one of his more memorable flicks (stick with "The Year of Living Dangerously"), he almost manages to pull the nose up enough on this one to keep it from going straight into the dirt. Two out of five for effort.


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