See, that's not my reaction to Signs at all. I don't care about the water thing.

Trying to solve the Problem of Evil in the limitations inherent in a movie is like trying to fuck a meat-grinder. Kudos for courage, but I'm still going to mock you for the mess you're going to make of yourself when you fail.

I don't think he was trying to solve the problem of evil. I don't think Icarus was trying to solve the problem of hubris.

This is because Icarus is a myth and myths work by certain rules and Icarus holds together better than the end of Signs does. I loved Signs until the end and even if it's a stand in for holy water at the end, a movie doesn't work or not because of the idea behind it. It's the execution that matters. There are plenty of awful films with really cool ideas.

MNS botched the ending on Signs. Demons and holy water may explain why he had it end like he did, but it does nothing to change the fact that he botched the execution of it in such a way that the nearly universal complaint of the film, now and when it was released, is about how much the ending sucks.

It's the quality of the writing/filming and not an arbitrary collection of rules that this film has been judged on.

::slips on his editor's hat::
The concept discussed here is called internal consistency. Once you have already accepted that a man can build wings out of wax and seagull feathers to escape an inescapable prison of his own design, it is clear to you that this is a fantasy story. And since Hubris is the key to the whole concept of Daedalus, showing that hubris passes to the Son is not out of place, and if you believe that the sun is a chariot driven by a god named Apollo, then of course getting to close to the gods on man made inventions will get you killed. You do not mess with the Greek gods. They will turn you into a spider.

Signs, being presented as a piece of magical realism like all of MNS's other works up to that point, is not a fantasy, and is therefore expected to work on more "realistic" rules. Which is actually silly, but as internal consistency is what enforces suspension of disbelief int he reader/viewer, fantastical elements are irrelevant in the story so long as they are consistent within the story's universe.

This is actually one of an Editor's big jobs- to help maintain internal consistency without destroying the story the author wants to tell.

::removes editor hat::

All things aside, I didn't even mind Signs that much, and didn't start hating on MNS until the village, which I really hated. I gave him another chance with Lady in the Water, which was meh IMO, and didn't bother to see another film by him until Airbender, which was enragingly bad- partially because I'm a huge fan of the series, but also because it just isn't well made (MNS apparently cannot direct action). To me, the message of signs was "everything happens for a reason", which is kind of lame, but I've seen worse films with a less ridiculous premise.

Basically, even this interpretation of Signs leaves it thoroughly in the meh column for me. I may give it a rewatch if it see it on Netflix or something, but I never understood the hate either.

Thanks Zero. That was a fine argument.

Personally, I think that Magical Realism is a form of fantasy, as exhibited by the genre's creator, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is ripe with symbolism. In 100 Years of Solitude, for example, the citizens of the town live Biblical lifespans until industry transforms them from the foggy haze of pre-industrial mythology to the flesh and blood real people of a scientific historiography. That is the level on which I believe Signs should be watched.

The reason that I think that a viewing on this level has merit is because it means that Signs is attempting, however successfully, to reconcile free will and determinism, which is a beautiful idea and is beautifully executed in the film. People aren't interested in that, though. They wanted another Independence Day or War of the Worlds. That's fine, but that movie that you're hating on those grounds doesn't exist. That's not what this is.

I want to be clear that I think the OP is kind of absurd, and that it falls into the same problem that most of the film's critics fall into - namely, an overly literal interpretation of the events being depicted.

That all said, I do have a couple of points to make on the in-universe logic of the movie.

1) Water doesn't kill the aliens. It burns them and distracts them, but it's not like the Wicked Witch of the West. A brutal beating from a baseball bat is what ultimately kills the alien that we see killed. To argue that aliens harmed by water wouldn't invade Earth is like saying that Frenchmen harmed by sub-zero temperatures would never try to march on Moscow. It's a shockingly dumb claim. What the aliens need or want from us is unknown, but we can likely assume that the invasion is being performed in the interest of the continuation of either their species or way of life.

2) There are plenty of reasons that they might not wear protective attire during the invasion. Maybe they have religious prohibitions against clothing. Maybe they never invented the idea of clothing, armor, or other protective garments. Maybe their space suits and other equipment have deteriorated after centuries of sub-light space travel, hence little in the way of sophisticated tools or weaponry. Maybe they have not yet seen oceans of liquid water, and assumed wrongly that they were looking at oceans of liquid nitrogen. Maybe they are not the ships' original occupants, we are their first target, and they don't really understand much about the dangers of landing on an alien planet. Maybe they have space rabies and are just crazy and violent. I can keep going, if needed - but as I said, I think this sort of literalist viewing of the material is wrong-headed.

http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videol ... 5585-signs

Signs also has one of the things that annoy me more and more, its this idea of an intelligent obviously technologically advanced race of aliens that comes to earth then drops down planet side... Naked

@Above poster

2) this is all some variant of dumb/unlikely H2O is NOT rare

Also i do not buy into this idea that you have to view a movie in this increasingly unlikely setup of lenses to make it work/make sense. Because the more of these "Oh well yes but if you accept that X" you apply the worse the story telling gets unless the film is made in the 60 and you just accept that a near lethal amount of drugs dos indeed make it make sense.

I agree that you don't have to and shouldn't view a movie through a series of increasingly baseless speculation. My point is that the film should not be viewed that way, but if people insist on viewing it that way then there's a rebuttal.

And oceans of H20 appear to be quite rare, in fact. It's also possible that life as it exists on Earth is unique or exceedingly rare, and that the aliens have so far only encountered life that is like them - the resulting assumptiong being that if you see animals breathing the atmosphere of a planet, you know that it's safe to land because other chemical arrangements tend not to support life. The idea that we should look for life on planets without liquid water is a relatively new concept for our scientists, and the contrasting point may never have occurred to theirs.

You're making a lot of logical leaps that the movie gives you no reason to make. You can make these kind of assumptions to close plot holes in any movie but it doesn't mean the plot holes don't still exist.

I would also count Magical Realism as a form of fantasy, but not in the way most people think when they hear "fantasy". 100 years of solitude is an excellent example, I also often use "Portrait of Dorian Gray" when trying to describe the Genre. No Gandalf, no Conan, not even Lovecraft, but definitely fantastic.

I would not put signs in this Genre because there are a lot of fantastical elements in the film. However, I blame trailer misrepresentation for people's disappointment. I mean seriously, can you watch this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kjiyQXnbHw and not expect a full on invasion flick, as opposed to an allegory for religious choice vs predestination in which the hero saves the day with a baseball bat and some bad housekeeping?

To jump back to Icarus- if someone told you that The Icarus story was about a wacky inventor who gets into odd circumstances with his son- and made it sound like a comedy, wouldn't you be disappointed? Especially with all the hype around MNS after his first two films. So yea, what the movie is actually about is one thing, and I do think the film should be judged on that- in which case I think it's pretty meh, neither spectacular or terrible. I would rather watch The Exorcist for my non-indie film discussions on faith. But I didn't regret paying for it or anything. But my own biases have always made me pretty resistant to hype backlash + Trailer Backlash, both of which hit this film hard.

I'm not, though. I'm not making any leaps, because I am not explaining the aliens or their behavior, because I recognize that there are virtually infinite explanations for it. The characters in the film had no way of receiving any information about either the aliens plans or capacity to behave differently, and so we got no answers. Fortunately, no answers are needed.

I don't know if the aliens are stupid, or if they are religious, or if they are sick. All I know is that the aliens landed without space suits. I can either react by saying, "That's so stupid! No aliens would ever do that! I should know!" or I can react by saying, "Oh, they must not wear space suits for some reason."

The list above was intended to point out that the second option is the more sensible.