It could have been a good alien flick, but numerous plot elements, the blase performances, stupid & uncreative aliens, and a terrible twist all bring it down.
M. Night Shyamalan did relatively good on The Sixth Sense, but in spite of a few more arguably decent films after that, this film seemingly began his downfall. His camera-work is undeniably of high quality, but there's nothing else really that was all that redeeming about this flick. The Sixth Sense did so well because of the twist and the original idea about a kid who sees and interacts with spirits, which no one could say was underwhelming. In this film, the twist basically ends up being a big non-coincidence, a test from God to test Mr. Hess' faith. That's stupid, fuck you Shyamalan.
One of the plot elements is that crop circles are forming on a family farm. No one likes that because crops are destroyed when those are made, so the family from that farm gets bothered by that. The family in question, the Hess family, was broken by the loss of their matriarch in a horrific car accident, as shown in the film opener. They are being terrorized, I guess, by the makers of those crop circles; aliens. As the film continues, it becomes apparent that there's more aliens around, many more. In fact, there's a world-wide invasion imminent where so many people will die. Whoop-de-doo, because everyone is seemingly detached from what, you'd think, would be a dark and uncertain time. I'd be busy getting prepared, armed, and whatever else for such an attack, incensed and scared along the way. But these people are bored, borderline-cynical at all times, depressing, and rather uninteresting. Plus, there's no chemistry to be had with ANYBODY.
Another plot element is that there are some character traits that turn out to be integral to the family's well-being in the end, for some stupid reason. Towards the end, the patriarch of the family reminisces about what his wife said in her last moments; "tell Meryl, swing away!" You're an idiot, Shyamalan. Was this a premonition, let alone a prediction on her part? If so, why didn't she just say, "aliens are going to invade the planet and attack you as well, get ready for that!" The little girl is obsessive-compulsive with drinking water and by the end of the movie there's dozens upon dozens of nigh-full glasses of water peppering the entire house. Though it would've killed most of the movie's stupid points to have her sent to a psychiatrist for such behavior, I guess the writers of the movie stuck with it. And the Caulkin kid has asthma and it manages to be the only sensible 'coincidence' in the plot.
The aliens are amongst the most disappointing in film history. Sure, you could call the 50's sci-fi flick aliens dreadful in comparison, but those were lighthearted efforts in film-making; this Shyamalan idiot took the project seriously, though. The aliens to be found here amount to big green men with somewhat rugged features, naked as the day they were born, somehow being such a grave threat to humanity. Oh, and it's revealed that although they wish to attack humanity en masse, they don't want to use any of their weaponry against us because they somehow know of our nukes and think we'll resort to using them on their plentiful supply of flying saucers. We first get a good glance at one of them in a scene-in-a-movie where one of them walks across a pathway into the bushes, with amateur child actors screaming and insanely ranting in Spanish or Portuguese or who cares. That scene apparently took place in a rainforest. Keep note of this observation because it plays a fucking stupid role in their fucking stupid design later. Or maybe you can put on a tinfoil hat like little Caulkin does in one scene (as well as Phoenix & whoever the little girl is) and forget it.
Said aliens are also terrorizing the Hess family, as has been established already. Though it does takes a while for them to actually realize this (Mr. Hess figures it out last, must've been praying too hard to care). They can leap at least a dozen feet into the air onto the roof of their house and stuff, Olympians can apparently do the same thing too as one minor character states, and play cat & mouse games with them, scaring everybody and click-talking to each other while being snooped on by our protagonists with...baby monitors. Nothing else seems to detect their communications but these devices with focused radio frequencies (this was discovered by these passive-aggressive kids filling roles of protagonists of all people). Further, no one else on Earth seems to have mastered eavesdropping on these aliens speaking to each other like these kids do, not even the military full of highly trained adults, who you'd think would have achieved even better results. Well, moving on, the patriarch later kind of runs into one of them one-on-one, behind a closed door. Earlier, he stupidly went on journey through his corn-field trying to get a drop on just who or what is tinkering with his food supply, without ANY defenses whatsoever, and ends up running away scared. Shyamalan made a cameo in this film, and his boring character locked one behind said door as it tried to kill him. It doesn't make much sense but who cares, right? Anyway, Hess ends up casually going into Shyamalan's messy house and goes to that door (which leads to a pantry), kneels down, tries to get a glimpse of it, but the alien unsurprisingly lashes a clawed hand out at him from under the door. In panic, and since he was brandishing a knife of all things to try and get some sight of the thing, he cuts off the fingers of the alien. Why it doesn't just break down that damn door is beyond all sense since it can otherwise leap fairly high into the air, but whatever, it screamed in pain and he went back home so this scene can finish justly.
Just before that scene, though, was described the aliens' Achilles Heel, their kryptonite. Well, is it fire? Is it very high sound frequencies? Is it light? Cold? A pop singer's non-auto-tuned singing voice? A mother's constant nagging? No, it's none of those sensibly fatal things. It's only one of the most abundant compounds within the biosphere of our planet that's what; WATER. Yes,
water hurts them, burns at their skin and is poisonous and the whole she-bang. They apparently "try to avoid places near water" as an uncharismatic Shyamalan tells us, although basic logic paints virtually every location in the biosphere as being QUITE NEAR water, so why the aliens would even try to invade the world butt-fucking-naked is beyond understanding. Did Shyamalan and the other buffoons writing this just throw out all notion of basic chemistry with this shit? Or did they think there's a significant difference between the water that is in vapor form (think humidity) and water that is in liquid form? There is none. All of the elements are there! WHY DOES A COMBINATION OF ELEMENTS IN LIQUID FORM HURT THEM WHEN THE SAME COMBINATION OF ELEMENTS IN GASEOUS FORM DOESN'T? This should have kept these retards in green skin from even going near the rainforest areas of South America and the Northwest Pacific region of North America (amongst many other high-humidity regions across this water planet), but for the sake of this stupid, half-assed alien invasion movie intended as a subtle conversion method to continue so that we can have a climax at all, they were able to survive just fine with the high humidity of such regions, even brushing up against plants that collect water in liquid form. Shyamalan and anybody else responsible for this plot element must've been high at best, one-hundred percent ignorant at worst, but regardless either-way ended up insulting the audience with such trifling attempts at portraying an enemy's weakness.
A little earlier in the film, the whole thing about there "being no coincidences" is shoved RIGHT IN YOUR FACE, and Gibson is the weapon for this task. Allusions are made about the incident displayed at the beginning of this stinker film where, you know, maybe Mrs. Hess was hinting at something while dying and all that because God wills it of course! So is Shyamalan trying to push his beliefs onto his audience with this tripe? Or is it a clever plot piece that will dazzle us in the end? Are the aliens in fact demons from hell and his immediate family angels from heaven? Is this one person's struggle to maintain his faith in god the only important thing to him rather than trying to help save the world, and should the viewers care? Should I just stop talking about this plot element that makes this film a deceptive & pretentious moral lesson in film form and because it is completely unimportant for entertainment and escapism value? Okay, I will do that then.
The invasion begins on the family a while after he gets home. Before that, they have a nice meal where they pray and everyone starts crying, on depression overdrive since throughout the film's entirety everyone is depressed (except for the little girl of course), and Hess Sr. tries to get everyone to stop crying and they all embrace in the end. Aw, so touching! Anyway, with the only real smart decision they've ever made at this point in the film, they figure that maybe they should huddle inside of the house, keeping the aliens out with barricades built over windows & doors as best as possible. When the aliens start trying to make their way inside to kill everybody with their naked selves without any laser cannons or whatever, Mr. Hess realizes he forgot to board up the attic and all that. Nice going, Slim! You pretty much doomed your family even though because this is a movie you're predictably going to live anyway so this doesn't matter at all! Anyway, they figure they have little time to get to the last safe part of the house before getting killed, so they descend to the basement. There's no barricade to be made so they use an axe. Yeah, that's right, a mere axe does the trick against aliens that may or may not be strong enough to bust down the old looking door (that's definitely not oak). That and they shove their body-weight up to the door to hopefully keep the stupid green things outside from getting in to kill these stupid humans we're supposed to care about. No one thinks that perhaps there's nothing wrong with using that axe to defend themselves, but then this movie would approach cliche territory wouldn't it? In spite of their efforts, those idiotic, naked green aliens manage to partially get in anyway, through a fireplace conveniently built inside of this pitch dark and dirty basement. But it doesn't matter since the aliens seem to give up trying that way, in spite of being able to grope the Caulkin kid and make them knock out their only light source in a panic. Fuck alternative measures to kill stupid humans! Well, eventually this meager attempt at an intense action scene (coupled with the boy having an asthma attack to keep the audience interested with emotional appeal) fades out, the aliens have clearly given up despite having traveled billions of light-years for this shit, and daylight breaks. The aliens are nowhere to be found so they go outside confident that there's no more threat, and then that confidence is soon broken by just one lone alien holding lil' Caulkin. It's the same one who Mr. Hess butchered earlier in the film. Payback time!
The little girl's obsessive-compulsive habits of leaving nearly-full glasses of water EVERY-FUCKING-WHERE allow Meryl's propensity to "swing away" (remember, Shyamalan is trying to tell you that NONE OF THIS IS A COINCIDENCE and
that this is scary shit), showing the possibly dumbfounded audience that these aliens are dangerously sensitive to fucking water, of all things, and it won't fight back against this bored Joaquin Phoenix, either. It just snarls at him and takes each long-delayed swing of Meryl's wooden bat like a retarded oaf, a completely naked bondage-loving masochist. Even when he's clearly going to swing away like the dying woman at the beginning movie said he would, twirling his bat like a giddy minor league kid would, the alien at most strafes around doing nothing otherwise. And when it finally dies, breathing its last stupid breaths since it and its race felt that using weaponry against humans would make us stupidly use nuclear weapons against them (the Caulkin kid somehow knew this bit of detail just by watching the news all the time and killed any hope of the film making sense later on) making their efforts somehow made useless after such a result, but no one gives a shit. It fucking dies and the Caulkin kid is asleep pretending to be unconscious.
The alien managed to poison the kid with some kind of gas (which it didn't use at all in any previous frame of this turd, could have been useful for them) before this stupid scene, but the poison doesn't actually work because he conveniently got hit by an asthma attack that very moment, so his lungs were closed, effectively saying "fuck you" to any reason for the audience to care. While there was no struggle on his part to get some air like a (depressed) fish out of water, he's stone-cold knocked out and completely motionless and of course no one wants a little boy to die in a movie in this sensitive culture of ours, especially a relative to Macaulay Caulkin! So Mr. Hess holds him in his arms desperate for reprieve and he eventually wakes up just in time. It's a miracle! He doesn't die, relief washes over Gibson's melodramatic face, and lil' Caulkin asks what happened and bla-bla-bla, and the girl named Bo goes to get another drink and waste the town's supply of fresh water like a typical brat would. People are crying at this point like Gibson always does and we're left to wonder, "anything else?" The film fades out for a second, comes back, and it's winter-time, snow all 'round. Gibson's character is donning preacher garb again since he regained his faith in god for some reason and that's all folks, so much for signs popping up, there were no coincidences as you were forced to hear, and maybe he'll marry again and maybe we don't care.
That twist wasn't even invigorating and no one could conceivably give a shit about anybody in the film. It's a popcorn flick and that's where the film's quality ends. The music was one of the only redeemable qualities of the film, while the content we're supposed to care about was bland and uninspired. It's like only the technicalities of the film (audio & visual) were the good parts, while the ideas conceived by the kindergarten-level idiots (water hurts aliens, my god) writing this shit were severe misses. That's definitely NOT the result a filmmaker should shoot for, but it was done this way regardless. Shyamalan's camera skills couldn't even make up for everything wrong with this movie, which is nearly everything we're supposed to be entertained by. And I'm not scared or thrilled by aliens stupid enough to attack a water-abundant planet in spite of their deadly weakness to said compound, naked and without any body protection, never using anything remotely resembling weaponry, since you know, they can achieve interstellar travel and complete cloaking of their flying saucers. They're the most incompetent space-traveling warmongers ever conceived.
And the crop circles seen in the film were unimaginative. People are still making crop circles in the real world and they look absolutely insane and creative in comparison. Fuck Shyamalan, his most recent boring efforts only prove that he's a one-hit-wonder.
D
+ Has a good thriller soundtrack.
+ Good camerawork and high quality picture.
+ Mel Gibson does a fairly good job as usual.
- Retarded aliens, stupid design of said aliens, and the worst idea for an Achilles Heel ever.
- Boring
- Plot idea of "everything is a coincidence" is outdated and poorly executed in this film.
- Everyone is depressing, bordering monotonous, and low-key. We don't care for anybody, really.
- Overly generic crop circle designs. Look at the many photos of REAL crop circles and laugh at what this film presented.
- Not scary whatsoever.
- Cookie-cutter intro text.
- The wife should have said something useful instead of saying that one of the boring characters should "swing away."
