When I picked up my paper this morning, the first thing I saw was a picture of a crop circle. And the “Skeptics” column in the latest Scientific American basically tells you how, with a lot of imagination, a fair amount of equipment, the agility of a Twister player and a whole lot of unwitting colleagues you can make your very own crop circles, thus demonstrating beyond a shadow of doubt that all crop circles are hoaxes. ⁽¹⁾ One may, with justice, suppose that this is largely due to M. Night Shyamalan’s new film Signs.

Or, more correctly, to the prerelease publicity for Signs, and to the fact that it is the latest film from the director of The Sixth Sense. IMHO Signs by itself and associated with someone else would generate nowhere near as much public response.

Somewhere in Bucks County, PA, there is an old farmhouse in which a former priest (Episcopalian, I suspect, though this is not made clear), his former minor-league baseball player brother, and his two children by a wife who was killed last year in an unfortunate auto accident, live together. The movie starts with their discovering a crop circle in their field. Their two dogs behave strangely, and one is killed during an apparent attack on the daughter. Then crop circles start appearing elsewhere in the world. Lights appear in the sky over major cities. Everybody girds up for an Independence Day-style attack on the planet. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of our farmhouse are boarding up the windows and doors, for this is where the movie’s action will all take place …

The movie, however, is not really about an alien attack but about sometime Father Graham Hess’s (Mel Gibson) crisis of faith, brought on by his wife’s death, by her final disjointed words which make no sense to Hess. The movie purports to show how he regains his faith in this time of terrible crisis, and how — I suppose — God works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.

I was not terribly impressed, I’m afraid. Shyamalan (who, emulating Hitchcock but here perhaps overdoing it, appears in his own film as the veterinarian Ray Reddy) is, to some extent, living off the reputation from his earlier movie, as he also did with Unbreakable. He has produced a good, workmanlike film with, again in my humble opinion, a fair number of flaws, but not the quality of film that one expects, perhaps unfairly, from Shyamalan. It is nice to see the Emperor Commodus of Gladiator here as a sympathetic character (Joaquin Phoenix as the brother Merrill Hess), but I was less impressed by the two children (Rory Culkin, younger brother of Macauley, and little Abigail Breslin debuting here), whose material seemed to be somewhat spotty in motivation; Morgan Hess’s asthma turns out to be important to the resolution, but his apparent love-hate relationship with his father doesn’t, nor does Bo’s hydrophobia (literally; I’m not referring to rabies), though the water itself does. Officer Caroline (Cherry Jones) wanders through the set several times, but far too little is done with her. The perception of an alien invasion (or visit) is important to the film, but the invasion itself, as we see it, isn’t. The on-set appearance of a hungry alien at the climax provides the means to resolve a number of points, but seems to me to be somewhat jarring and contrived, given the low-key treatment Shyamalan gives the invasion earlier in the film; it reminded me of the last page of “Johán Valano’s” Ĉu li venis trakosme?, which introduced an identical incongruity.

Prediction: few “legs” on this one, despite the collaboration of Shyamalan and the ever-popular Gibson. It’s a “TV movie” — i.e., what effects it has on the viewer will be as pronounced when he’s lying on his bed watching it on the tube as when he’s sitting in stadium seating watching it on the wide screen. Probably best to treat it as such.

⁽¹⁾ It’s a bit sad to see how the Law of Least Effort — William of Occam’s “Razor” — has been turned from a philosphical convenience into a natural law at the same time that its meaning has been changed to that of a synonym for “common sense — my common sense”.