What's the #1 sign the movie you're watching sucks? It's called Signs (which was on TV last night). The beginning, not so bad. Middle, meh. Ending, worst ever. Let's recap.
Mel Gibson's faith is shattered by his wife's death. The last thing she says is "swing away." Crazy Mel is under the impression that this was random because of neurons firing in her brain as she died. At the end, when an alien, whose species obviously has superior technology which included cloaking devices and flying saucers, is holding Crazy Mel's son. Joaquin Phoenix begins to approach the alien, but Mel tells him "No, wait." During this time, the alien shoots some poison gas at the kid's face. After a flashback to his wife's death, Crazy Mel tells Joaquin to "swing away." Joaquin grabs his baseball bat off the wall and clubs the alien with it. Some water spills out one of the many half-filled glasses that cover every flat surface of the house, and the alien is burned as though it were acid. This is following a news reporter on the radio saying that the battle with the aliens turned somewhere in the middle east, where people found a primitive way to defeat the aliens, but no further information was available at the time.
How many things are wrong with this? Let's recap.
When a hostile alien is holding your son, you beat some hostile alien ass. You don't wait for him to shoot poison gas in his face. The big resurgence of faith occurs when when Crazy Mel has the revelation connecting his wife saying "swing away" with this situation? He needed that tip? Grabbing that bat and thumping the alien would simply be reflex, one would think. As far as the many, many, many glasses of water everywhere, what's worse than having symbolism shoved in your face all movie long? We get it, M Night Shamalamadingdong, you overhyped weirdo, the half-filled cups are his faith. Really, we get it. The news reporter. You were able to uncover just exactly where the battle turned, but you couldn't figure out how? One might even consider that to be the more pertinent information in this scenario, that the secret weapon is WATER. Finally, the secret weapon is WATER. SCREW THAT. You're telling me that this intellectually superior race attacked a planet whose atmosphere and body are comprised nearly entirely of something that's deadly to you? You're harvesting humans, but haven't figured out that we are made of that same ever so deadly substance? That would be like if rocks were poisonous to humans and we decided to attack the moon.
