Signs
Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 7
Suspense: 8
Humor: 3
Horror: 6
Eye Candy: 6
Fun Factor: 3
Replayability: 3
Overall: 5

This was the first (and so far only) M. Night Shyamalan movie I've seen, though I've heard about The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable forever, and how widely people are split on their opinion of his work. (I saw Signs on a DVD from the library in July, before the release of The Village, so the coverage of that movie didn't effect my viewing of Signs.) I knew, going in to Signs, that Shyamalan aspired to be this generation's Hitchcock, and that he was very good at setting a creepy mood and tone and creating great suspense from almost nothing. No one seems to deny his skill at directing; it's the plots and characters and stories he chooses to tell that people debate. I knew something about Signs, that it involved aliens and an ex-reverend losing his faith and then maybe regaining it.

So while I knew of and about Shyamalan's movies, I'd never actually seen any of them, and had generally heard that Signs was pretty good, at least during the set up. And I agree, it had a very effectively creepy set up, if you could buy into the relative absurdity of it all.  But when it came to the pay off, the grand finale, where the flashbacks were resolved and they came up out of the cellar and saw what was in their living room... I thought the movie fell apart completely and just became ridiculous. If I'd only seen the first 80% of this film, I probably would have given it a 7.5 or an 8 overall. But since I thought the ending was not just bad, but actively horrible, my score for it and for everything else came tumbling down.

I'm not going to compile one of my lists of nit picking details for this film, but if I did it would be very, very long. The following paragraphs contain spoilers, since the movie came out years ago and I figure you've all seen it or at least heard about it by now.

The whole "allergic to water" part was certainly the weakest and more ridiculous thing in the movie, but it wasn't like the aliens made any sense on any other level either. They can navigate the universe, find a planet with suitable life forms to randomly-terrorize, etc. But then they've got to make crop circles to mark where they're supposed to land. They don't have a slightly more advanced location system than flattened corn stalks? And it wasn't as if it mattered where they landed anyway, they didn't have any more strategy than "land and terrorize and try not to get locked into pantries."

Moreover, they pick a planet covered in water, where it rains all the time and the air is largely composed of water vapor, and then go in to attack without any sort of protective gear or weaponry. Mel Gibson's farm had to be the only one in America that didn't have a few hunting rifles or shotguns lying around, and even without them a few boards with nails in them is more than enough to keep out the invading alien horde. They can build spacecraft but they don't know how to pick up a rock?  Or carry a chainsaw? And they're not smart enough to just grab people and carry them away, rather than trying to do their pointlessly-nefarious poison gas thing right in the living room?

It was like they were some sort of alien-zombies; scary, deadly in some ways but so stupid in others that it was just embarrassing. Imagine you and five friends are going to try and break into a house that's protected only by a few boards nailed over the windows. It's a farm house, so there are hoes and hammers and saws and all sorts of other heavy tools out in the shed, and anyway, you can leap up onto the roof and they didn't seal all the upper windows. How long are you going to spend clawing at boards you can't pull off bare-handed? How stupid do you have to be to not organize your friends to pick up a table and use it to bash the basement door down?  It was like Shyamalan wanted to make a monster movie, and tie it in with crop circles, but when he decided to make the monsters actual intelligent humanoid aliens he was too lazy to rewrite the plot events to make sense.  So they're basically just wandering idiots who look scary, but don't have enough intelligence to do anything productive.

As Ebert said, in his one-star review of The Village: 

I was never that involved, and while the first hour of Signs worked quite well for me, even though it felt a bit manipulative, "can we please just barely see one more creepy thing vanishing into the darkness of the cow rows," I was still more or less caught up in the suspense, and I was watching it at home. If I'd seen it in the theater without knowing anything about it, I think I would have really been into it, though the ending would still have seemed very, very stupid.

I also didn't like the connected "rediscovering his faith" subplot, since it felt very ham-handed. Mel's wife died in impossibly melodramatic fashion, and left him only her incomprehensible "swing away" dying message. So of course that's what saves the little kid in the end when Mel's able to tell his brother to "swing away" with the bat. I must admit that I've never beaten an alien to death while it was trying to poison my nephew, but do you really need a dying message from your brother's wife to tell you to grab a club and use it to whack a dangerous intruder?

We're also supposed to see the little girl's phase of not drinking water and leaving full cups all over the house as a blessing since it helped save them from the naked alien, and the little boy's asthma as a blessing since his lungs closed off and therefore he didn't breath any of the poison. (As if any quality poison gas wouldn't just absorb through the mucus membranes in your mouth and throat, even if you didn't swallow it.) I mean yeah, all the little clues throughout the movie end up tying together and making sense, but they make such a stupid-sense that it felt very manipulative to me. Like Shyamalan spent too much time writing cute little things into the script just because he thought he was so clever, rather than because they were needed and helped the plot work.