Signs | Canadian First Time Watching | Movie Reaction | Movie Review | Movie Commentary 

Yes, y'all are very good at analyzing to the heart of the movie, and it was good that you nailed this one so quickly. 👏🏾

Ikr people go into this movie expecting a alien creature feature when it's much more than that.

Yeah, I remember being disappointed initially at the portrayal of the aliens in terms of design and how much we saw of them. On recent rewatch, I honestly don't care and I think showing more of the aliens would have detracted from the point of the film itself. Shyamalan's best films are about the struggle between what you belief and what is true, even in his most recent film. So yeah, the aliens themselves are the very least of the film even as that plot gives the film its momentum

I'd say they were probably Camrys.

Exactly, I'm not even religious but I enjoy this type of storytelling.

It legit freaked me out when I watched it at home as a kid. I thought it was only me over reacting

​@@grc3rbI was 10 when this movie came out. And I can absolutely say it terrified me beyond belief lol. The corn field scene and the birthday party video in particular haunted my ass for the next year. I couldn't even sleep the night I came back from the theaters, my poor dad got yelled at by my mom for taking me to a scary movie lol but I'm glad he did. Was such a great movie and part of my childhood

7th grade I watched this at a sleepover at a friend's when this first came out on DVD. The birthday video freaked me the Fuck out!!! Jumped out of my skin, heart racing.. I had never been so freaked out by a movie until then.

I love that at the time it was used as a "real" alien video by people on the internet, and since there weren't as many people debunking things at the time it went wild.

Yes, I had the same experience. It was so freaky.

I don’t know man, his acting in the Patriot was amazing. Especially when it was one of the scenes where he had to be grieving from losing a son.

Braveheart was his masterpiece.

You fool. It was clearly his role as Rocky the Rhode Island Red in Chicken Run.

Sad but true that often some of the the most talented artist are often deeply flawed people.

I agree with you, but I think at the very least it's his most nuanced role. He has to play a lot of layered emotion in this film that you don't often see him play. It's displayed beautifully when he's talking to Ray before he leaves.

Wholeheartedly agree. It is the ONLY time as an adult I got goosebumps from a movie.

It’s also nice how it’s almost a soft jump scare. A modern movie would have blasted a music sting like in insidious or the conjuring the soft music sting really works well here

I watched this when I was way too young, and I was traumatized by the damn foot in the corn scene. That's it, a fucking FOOT leaving the scene into the corn traumatized me😂

I also think the scares had more impact in the theaters when it came out. something about the analogue-ness of film made the CGI of the creatures less glaring, and the darks seemed darker. it's weird how movies like jurassic park actually look worse in some ways when they're remastered in digital. the early cgi tended to blend better on film and the dynamic range of the lighting always looks less rich. (maybe it's just that most tvs now have way higher brightness or something)

ala; War Of The Worlds when the martian is seen outside the window.

What really didn't help for me was we had corn growing around my house when this movie came out. I was 9 at the time

I saw it when I was 6...Still scared of ut

Try being 6

Seconded

Thirded

I mean, if they need another reason to watch that film, how's about Steve Carrell, Toni Collette, Paul Dano, Greg Kinnear, and the late, oh so great, Alan Arkin. That is one incredibly stacked cast!

Honestly, Little Miss Sunshine is so in your wheelhouse. Please consider watching it.

4th'd

Yeah, a normal human would not be shrugging off those blows.

Hello Mr Lebowski! Nice to see you here. Love your compilations!

@@logankean7336 thank you!

Could've replaced the aliens with demons to tie in with religion and hellfire getting doused with "holy" water.

@@Avocado11 That's a running theory with the film. The little girl is described as angelic when she was born and has blessed all the water in the house. There was a claim back in the day that there were allusions to a number of old folktales about demons and devils being unable to open certain types of doors and apparently these were in a book that shyamalan had read when he was a kid, so he put that stuff into this movie. Crop circles were seen as demonic back in the day because it was either a meeting place to practice witchcraft. There were also 'fairy-circles' which is an actual natural phenomenon where this certain type of fungus will spread from a point and create a ring of little mushrooms. So there are a lot of people who think this is actually a movie about demons and not aliens. I think it's fine, either way. The water thing is kinda dumb if it's aliens, but the aliens in most movies don't make much sense if you think about it, so it's fine.

The family dinner is one of the most moving in all of the films I've ever seen. Nothing quite as emotional as seeing a father break down as his child cries in the background. The stress of the entire situation congeals in that moment.

Just throwing out there that there's also the George Pal version of War of the Worlds from 1953 that shouldn't be overlooked.

The tough one for me is when Texas is portrayed in film. Texas is so large and vast and has large areas of grass, but it's always looks like desert, cowboys, hats, and large belts. The number of times I had a tourist ask me if I have a horse and, if so, how many? Is astounding. 🤠🐎

The water thing really bothered me the first time I saw it too. I found myself coming up with ways that this seemingly unlikely scenario could be plausible... and while I could, it was still a bit of a stretch. Like these might not be the "real" aliens, just the stupid scout/shock troops. Maybe they were there for the mineral resources, and just wanted to analyze the lifeforms on the planet before the "real" invasion. Again, though, even that has a lot of holes.

As our understanding of the universe grows, it's becoming more and more apparent that water is not a rare resource and in fact is found just about everywhere with a temperature low enough. Life, or more specifically complex life, may well be *far* more rare, and indeed to the best of our current knowledge has only ever occurred on this planet. In that light it would make sense for the aliens to target a planet with life despite it having so much water, if you can invent a reason for them to be abducting complex life forms and _then_ make the even bigger leap to figure out how a species with such a severe allergy to water ever existed in the first place. Like George & Simone said, Signs fails miserably as a science fiction movie, but it wasn't meant to be a science fiction movie anyway. (Best somewhat plausible explanation I can think of for the alien angle: the alien species had "found" us via radio transmissions and subtle changes to the Earth's atmosphere indicative of life, and sent these forces on a purely scouting mission to collect samples of us for further analysis and to determine if we were (or were likely to become) a threat to them. Although this still requires a massive suspension of disbelief over why they didn't just collect humans from the many arid regions we live in, and why they could protect themselves from the dangers of space while traveling here but hadn't quite puzzled out a raincoat & rubber boots.)

@Trashcan-Man yeah if water can kill you? Why invade a planet that is made up of 70 percent water?

Exactly and the aliens are supposed to be demons who get exorcised by the holy blessed water, ala miracle.

@@harish123az oh wow that’s interesting

@@DeeSee25 no, it's not... it's just dumb. ^^

@@barbarusbloodshed6347 If the creatures weren't supposed to be demons, then the aliens are extremely unwise to come to a planet mostly covered with a substance toxic to them. It's like if humans deliberately tried to colonize a planet mostly covered by oceans of hydrofluoric acid.

*Shyamalan

Great description.

Should've worn a spacesuit.

Not sure how true it is, but apparently the first day of planned filming to start was when 9/11 occured which if true definitely can be seen in the film as a whole

I love that moment too. Once I read someone criticize the screenplay, saying that Merrill should have yelled "Vamos", as they were in Brazil and speaking Portuguese. I call it good characterization--no way in heck a jock, gas station cashier like Merrill would think to distinguish between Spanish and Portuguese in a moment like that.

And we understand the general region of Midwest to near old New England, so that is a fairly different culture and natural ecosystem than if they were outside Portland or Albuquerque or Des Moines or Atlanta, and that distance from a city being more rural than suburban or urban.

Also, the description of where you are can change depending on the audience. If I'm talking to someone outside of the United States, I might say that I was born in a city about an hour south of San Francisco, which is a very famous city they're likely to recognize. They'll have that as a general frame of reference - west coast of the U.S., in California. But, if I'm talking to someone who lives in California, it's like zooming in on a map and now I might be able to mention other cities they'd recognize, not just San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento, or San Diego. I can talk about Fresno, San Jose, Santa Barbara, Napa, Bakersfield, Santa Monica, Anaheim, Santa Cruz, etc. Parts of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home were filmed in the SF Bay Area and locals will recognize the Monterey Bay Aquarium, but people who don't live there might have no idea where that is, so "2 hours outside of San Francisco" helps establish an area.

Shyamalan is from Pennsylvania and still lives there. He has centered a bunch of his movies in Pennsylvania. Signs, The Village, Unbreakable, The Sixth Sense, The Happening, Lady in the Water. All in Penn.

Some rural areas of Texas have speed limits of 85!

Abigail Breslin was also very good in the horror movie "Haunter" that came out in 2013.

its actually simpler. a priest would have blessed his own well. and it was common practice for them to bless new wells also.

Human in a bad alien costume, it looks so silly.

20+ years later and I still have to mentally brace myself for this scene 😑

good point, but water burns them on contact to the equllivent of a powerfull acid. Faster than concentrated hydrochloric acid. So in their advanced wisdom, they pillage a planet that is 71% water, and abduct people that are basically 50-70% water.

I also think it was an actual pollutant in the water that hurt the aliens, rather than the water itself. Mainly because Bo kept drawing attention to the water tasting bad & being contaminated.

@@VerneditheSnail Yeah that’s always how I read it too. Especially with the whole tin foil hat conspiracy jokes, it made me think of how people have conspiracies about why fluoride is being added to water.

Maybe they're allergic to fluoride

@@VerneditheSnail Nah that was just a huge coincidence. Or rather a sign from God which helped him in his struggle with his faith.

Exactly, I loved the Village as a love story and the fact that it still gets crap for not being a good horror movie is a shame. In fact I loved Lady in the Water because it's a love of myth and ancient stories.

I agree that there were parts of The Village that moved me more than any other of his movies.. but I just get so frustrated with his 3rd acts a lot. seems like he's always trying to recapture the magic of the 6th sense ending but never pulling it off

@@swish007 This is true, forever going for that plot twist that isn't always needed. But regarding The Village, it doesn't make it a bad movie (nor is it perfect). People who claim so need to watch more movies.

@@swish007 That is true. He does tend to have trouble in the third act of his movies and the pay off just ends up being some kind of twist that really wasn't necessary.

What's interesting about The Village is that people talk about the twist but it was telegraphed way early in the movie when a character is telling a story and mentions a dumpster. If you were paying attention the twist wasn't a twist.

Which doesn't hold up in today's modern age.

@@Eidlones Really? I think the ending of "War of the Worlds" (any version) makes the most scientific sense of any alien invasion story. At the very least, it's entirely plausible.

@@Johnny_Socko I don't see how a species capable of interstellar travel wouldn't know about germs. It worked back then, cause it was a relatively new discovery.

@@Eidlones They were, ironically, TOO advanced. They erradicated all pathogens in their planet millennia ago, so they forget about them. Or at least is the most sensible theory i heard about that issue.

The weakness to water makes sense if you compare it to humans. Humans go to locations that could easily potentially kill them if they have reason such as trying to acquire something valuable. If that something is more valuable than the potential risk of danger or death in the long run than they simply go there. Risk assessment, basically, which is really not that different then explorers going somewhere for something tnn at has disease, the elements, animals, other uncontacted humans that could all kill them

A double barrel and a box of shells would have been a game changer

They're in a rural area but they're a fairly short drive away from three of the biggest, most important cities in the United States and one of the most densely populated areas in the country. The President of the United States is being briefed on the alien threat less than 200 miles away. New Yorkers are panicking and looting in NYC about 90 miles away. With rural roads, it might take you about 2-3 hours to get to some of these places obeying the speed limit, but if the aliens start glassing cities and sending tripods down to exterminate everyone they find with their deathrays, they'll be at your farmhouse pretty soon. Even if they're very thorough and burning humans out in a grid pattern, they might still arrive in a day or two. If you were in Nebraska or Iowa, you'd feel a lot more safe even if there might be some flying saucers over major cities like Denver or Chicago. There's a whole lot of nothing between you and there, and you'd have a lot more time to try and evacuate to somewhere else the aliens aren't going to immediately go.

They use kilometers up there in Canada.

45 miles = 72.42 km

Personally, I've gotta go with Sixth Sense...

@@docmetal8194 I totally get it and I understand why everybody loves it, but I just personally never watched Six Sense as much as I did Signs

The twist part is fine. The problem is that it relies on the whole weakness to water thing. That's just so dumb.

​@ApesAmongUs Also the whole "god killed my wife to tell my brother to hit the alien with a bat" thing

@@ApesAmongUs "I know we're deathly allergic to water but let's go hand-to-hand-gas some apes that consist of 60 % water on a planet with a surface that's 70% water where it precipitates all the time, and let's do it in the nude! but first let's walk around a bit and send freaky radio signals to scare some kids for no strategic reason, also let's let the apes know we're here by making circles in their food"

Agreed, the twist never bothered me, and this movie as a whole is so brilliantly made.

@@Eidlones I think that infuriates me more than the water thing. I am very conflicted about this movie. I can only describe it at the best movie in the world with a dumb plot.

I think its been all but confirmed. he absolutely would have blessed his own well, and it was a common practice to have men of faith bless new wells in small town. the radio says the solution was discovered in the middle east (ie the holy land). plus the overall theme that its all real (ie their religion)

I take that back. he actually DID confirm it in a 2006 interview with SomethingAweful.

It's a shame HBO couldn't afford to keep Rome going with Game of Thrones.

Protecting them. Thank you.

Regular water works if you go by the old 'moving water' folklore, and the not being able to open doors fits too with folklore...

@@leonagnew895Does it really make more sense, though? I like the existence of the demon theory just cause it goes to show how little the movie elaborates on what is actually happening. But if the question is “why don’t they just wear clothes” when we’re talking about aliens, I don’t know why it’s not legitimate to ask why a demon wouldn’t just wear clothes either. To me it just shows that if it’s overtly supernatural, people don’t care if it doesn’t make sense. But if it’s not overtly supernatural and just really vague instead, people invent a bunch a reasons why it’s unrealistic despite not actually knowing what’s going on any better than if it *were* supernatural.

@@leonagnew895 It definitely works on a thematic, figurative level. Like, the aliens *represent* demons makes a lot of sense. But I do like the grounded approach this movie takes and I feel like it being overtly supernatural would ruin that for me a bit.

Eh, this feels like forcing your own narrative

@@TheCrazyCloonPerhaps a tad. But the other option is to believe that these aliens could master interstellar flight but still decided to do a ground invasion wearing no armor on a planet that is covered in a substance that kills them all so they could just get up into melee range of humans to poison them. And that seems slightly ridiculous.

⁠​⁠@@johnwolfe7596If an inferior being saw us operating a GPS, they’d probably be equally surprised to see so many of us follow it out into the desert, break down and die. I’ve always assumed these aliens were desperate and vastly under resourced. Maybe even refugees. Just stole a bunch of ships and got the hell out of dodge. Some of these questions have pretty plausible answers. And most are very human centric in their presumptions. For instance, we know nothing about their biology. Maybe water is literally the only thing their biology is vulnerable to and until this moment, they’ve never had to combat it. If the whole “invasion” journey is last minute, with Earth maybe not even being the ultimate destination, at what point would they choose to *invent* armor just to do this one thing? The plan may have always been to go in, get what they need, and get out before anyone realizes how easy it is to kill them here. But the assumption that they would need armor is a human centric one. It’s based solely on *our* experience of needing some form of it on a daily basis. But we’re a completely different species. There’s no reason that a species with a different biology than us would necessarily evolve the concept of clothing and armor. Humans are used to stuff getting in our skin and it hurting, but another species could evolve a biological solution to that problem long before intelligence evolved, leading to a situation where the beings in question simply don’t need to think about it almost at all. Hell, for all we know, what we’re looking at *is* the only armor that’s available to them and it’s the material itself that has this weakness, with the creature inside it not being anthropomorphic, and being much more vulnerable to Earth’s elements than whatever suit they had on hand. Maybe it’s an avatar and not one single alien died in the invasion while they got exactly what they came for. There’s many ways to crack this egg because everything we’re assuming is not based on actual knowledge of radically different species, but based on other movies we’ve seen before. So we’re basically just coming up with our own fictions and then deciding what we invented doesn’t make sense. But that’s not Signs’ problem because the movie doesn’t tell you anything with certitude about the aliens. It doesn’t give you rules and then go on to violate them. It doesn’t give you the rules period.

@@johnwolfe7596 People came up with this theory because the movie as presented is really dumb, and people wanted to come up with reasons to justify why they liked it anyway (on the strength of the performances and emotional tones). Apparently the director denies the theory is accurate. The fact that this was really meant to be just an alien invasion story makes it even worse, when fans came up with a much better one.

he confirmed it in an interview he did in 2006 with somethingaweful. that was a battle between heaven and hell and the water was in fact holy water.

But they was on well water tho

@@shawnjohnson2837 I was assuming they had water filtration system and water softener.

If you insist on seeking for meaning in random events, the risk is that you will eventually make one up. This is not a movie about finding faith. It is a movie that comments on "God's ridiculous plans". The manuscript of this movie is as ridiculous as most religious text in this world. "Swing away." Why does someone need to suffer, so that someone else will prosper? Why kill a beloved wife to send a message? Why would water, always present in the atmosphere, be a poison to "them"? No, this is not a religiously inspiring movie, quite the opposite.

⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠@@bodan1196Yeah, and that’s totally why he became a reverend again at the end of the movie, it’s DEFINITELY because the message of the film is that faith is a tragic thing. I’m not even very religious, but even I can see that the movie is religiously inspiring; the point isn’t that she had to die, it’s that her death wasn’t for nothing. The only other alternative was that there is no god and there are such things as coincidence, and in that case that’s by far the more depressing outcome, because then she really did die for no reason. Either way she’s still gonna die even if there isn’t some greater plan to it, so you’re point is invalid. Bottom line, just watch the movie and leave your personal philosophies out of it. Even if you’re an atheist or something, you just gotta except that in the world of this movie God is real, and in their world he is a positive force.

@@bodan1196 Or maybe it’s subjective and if you want to not believe the director that I’m right then you can believe whatever you want.

​@@williamhardee8863 Thank all that is good, that that God only exist in that movie.

@@scotter23 Touché.