“Signs” is an excellent movie with a terrible ending. To be fair, it’s pretty clear that the tale is more allegorical than literal: we’re not expected to believe that those particular aliens would invade Earth, the planet with enormous pools of acid lying around, and every now and then, falling from the sky. A planet in which the natives can spit at you and burn your skin. It would be like us invading the home planet of the aliens from “Alien” and then getting terribly surprised when they kick our arses.

One could construct an argument in which the aliens doing the invasion are doing the equivalent of a “Jackass” reality stupidity TV program (Run around naked on the planet of acid-spitting dwarves!), but that argument can be more generally used for the vast majority of military SF films, and I’m planning on using it when I dissect “Starship Troopers” or “Independence Day”. One could also construct an argument in which this is the effort of the bio-weapons division of an alien mega-corporation, but again, we’re getting away from the point. We’re not meant to think of the aliens as literal aliens with their own planet/s, culture/s and so on. The story plays more a variation on the trials of Job. It’s all a test of faith for Mel.

The problem with the story as an allegory/test of faith is that the whole setup is a thudding contrivance, a god-driven Rube Goldberg device that provokes not cries of “Oh, of course!” but “Oh, come on!” The daughter leaves glasses of water all over the place and has terrible asthma, the wife dies and leaves a mysterious message, the brother is a washed-up baseball player, all for that one moment when the alien is in the room, so that they can hit it over the head with the baseball bat and throw cups of water at it and have asthma attacks thus avoiding its poison gas. This is the point at which we are supposed to see, like Mel, that this was all part of a divine contrivance.

Now, this is a perfectly legitimate plot surprise. A number of excellent films have had surprises of a similar nature, that satisfied instead of insulted – “Memento”, “Fight Club”, and of course “The Sixth Sense”. The revelation of “Signs”, however, feels stupid. Mel’s wife’s last words are there purely to remind the former baseball player that he can use a baseball bat to hit an alien repeatedly over the head. What, he wouldn’t have thought of it otherwise? He couldn’t have been a former champion sharpshooter? We need a more compellingly unique situation in order to sell this moment, one in which the alien has a large measure of control (thus preventing the situation from being pathetically contrived).

One simple way of doing this might be to have the confrontation take place not in their living room, but inside an alien spaceship, say. Thus the only possible weapon they have at hand is something inside the spaceship (a metal rod, say) and whatever they happen to have on them, like a couple of glasses of water – or some other liquid. We can happily get rid of the water-is-acid vulnerability, and replace it with something a little more obscure: sugar, say (so that the daughter is leaving cans of soft drink around), or milk, or blood. These would likely seem rather silly (and present an excellent excuse for product placement), but the mockability of aliens who can’t cope with milk isn’t much worse than those who dissolve in water, and at least has the distinction of not making the aliens look like idiots. Apart from dying from their milk mustaches. Or having parents say: “Look, soft drink really does rot your bones!”

This entry was posted on Monday, October 25th, 2004 at 7:20 pm and is filed under S, Science Fiction, Thriller, shellshear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.