Unfortunately, the previews have alerted you to most of the startling moments of the first half of the movie -- when Mel Gibson drops his flashlight, you know you're going to see an alien-looking leg disappearing into corn stalks; when he slips a knife under a door to use as a mirror, you know he's going to get spooked by something -- but fortunately, none of the essential moments from the last part of the film were given away, so you're genuinely unnerved by the tension and suspense.
It took me a while to warm up to Mel Gibson, but some of his acting here is the best I've seen from him in years, maybe since Gallipoli (well, I did like him in Conspiracy Theory). He handles the tough emotional scenes subtly (though he goes a bit overboard in some other scenes). I particularly liked his reaction to a stumbling (somewhat self-centered) apology from the man who accidentally killed his wife, and his conversation with his brother (Joaquin Phoenix) about the "two kinds of people" in the world, those who believe in miracles and a guiding force versus those who believe it's all chance and they're on their own. Phoenix's sly, half-joking response about which category he falls into gives Gibson's stark reply that much more impact. Atheist that I am, I was rather liking Gibson's ex-reverend's questioning his faith after his wife's death, but the resolution of the whole losing-his-religion thing really bothered me -- you can pretty well figure out which way that coin is going to fall, as this is a big Hollywood movie starring the so-religious-he's-against-birth-control Gibson, but the way it's handled seem too pat and glib to me. (Glenn Kenny's review in Premiere aptly quotes Vladimir Nabokov, who noted that three themes were "utterly taboo as far as most American publishers are concerned"; one of them is "the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106." Kenny has a lot of other great lines, particularly the one about Mummenschanz; you should check out his review.)
Nearly all the reviews I've read have characterized Joaquin Phoenix's character, Merrill, as "slow," but I didn't see that at all. He's vulnerable -- his emotions lie just beneath his skin -- but he's pretty sharp. [Nevertheless, you get the sense that maybe Mel didn't want too much competition from his younger co-star: Phoenix's character is passive, sports a gender-ambiguous name, and is "age-improbable," as Glenn Kenny snarkily puts it, presumably to suggest that Mel is youthful enough to have a 28-year-old brother, though I think Kenny's being a bit unfair here -- Gibson and Phoenix are only 18 years apart, according to the IMDB, and I've got an example right in my own family of siblings roughly 30 years apart. Speaking of which, I was asked by a guest at the recent surprise party for my aunt Connie's birthday, "So, you're Connie's sister?" (And everyone knew it was Connie's 60th birthday, so that wasn't prompted by her youthful appearance, so it must have been because I looked like I could plausibly be the sister of a 60-year-old.) Which was about right for a night during which I was told that, as a baby and young kid, I was whiny, difficult, a tagalong (so, basically, no one liked me from the start), and, to heap insult upon injury, that I used to wear only pink, frilly dresses (which I maintain is a damned lie, and my brother says he doesn't remember that either). Oh, and that I shoplifted a pair of "frilly pants" when I was still in a stroller. How cheering to find out that my relatives think I was born unlikable and dishonest. And enamored of frilly things.]
Writer-director-producer M. Night Shyamalan stumbles a few times; he overshadows some crucial suspense-building scenes with bombastic music in the first part of the movie, though by and large he lets the creepy sounds later in the movie speak for themselves. He's excellent at insinuating an escalating spookiness, mostly with the ambient noise (when he's not drowning it out with the soundtrack) -- the eerie rustling of the corn makes your skin prickle -- and he knows just when to puncture the tension with comic relief (though he's sometimes heavy-handed and obvious with the comedy). You sort of get the feeling, though, that he's getting attached to these "big surprise revelation" endings -- Signs, too, has the collage of previous key scenes from the movie that are supposed to spell out to people who haven't been paying attention -- like the couple a few seats away from me who chatted throughout the entire movie, tapped their feet loudly on the floor, laughed loudly during tensely quiet scenes, and actually initiated a cell phone call during the movie -- what the big twist is.
I liked the movie more than I was expecting to, Gibson
surprised me
with his performance, and, as always, Phoenix is wonderful to watch,
both
for his acting prowess and his vulnerable, melancholy
handsomeness.
Plus I hope this movie inspires leagues of pranksters to make crop
circles
all over the damn place, although now they'd probably get held in jail
without ever being charged or ever seeing a lawyer because God's Right
Hand Man, John Ashcroft, thinks they're giving terrorists coded
directions
to the Department of Justice, perhaps to remove the $8,000 blue curtain
the Puritan General ordered to block an old marble statue where you
could
see a woman's boobie! Because revealing a statue's boobie, as we
all know, means the terrorists have won.
*** SPOILERS and COMPLAINTS ALERT ***
That whole "swing away" stuff was just really damn hokey, wasn't it?
How come the Middle East finds the secret weapon against the aliens when (1) the Middle East is not the first place you would think of for lush cropland where crop circles could appear, (2) they have kind of limited access to water there, and (3) apparently the aliens don't make crop circles next to water because they don't like water, so how would you have crops in the Middle East without their being near some major water body?
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