s M. Night Shyamalan's suspense thriller opens, Pennsylvania farmer Graham Hess (Gibson) is a bitter and broken man. Hess is a former minister, and the death of his wife in a freak accident six months ago has shattered his faith and caused him to give up his ministry. Now Hess just wants to be left alone with his young son, Morgan (Culkin), his daughter, Bo (Breslin), and his younger brother, Merrill (Phoenix), who's come home to help out.
But the cosmic unknown refuses to let Hess be. As he tries to shut the divine out of his world, omens of quite a different sort begin to intrude on his solitude. It begins with the crop circles that appear one night in his cornfield. Then it's the animals' strange behavior, glimpses of shadowy figures among the corn and the strange signals picked up on an old baby monitor. As the Hess family starts getting seriously creeped out, they realize they aren't the only ones. The same things they're experiencing are happening around the world. Crop circles cover India, and a camcorder at a South American birthday party catches a glimpse of what looks like an alien.
Before long, the world is in the throes of a full-blown invasion. But the Hess family is locked in its own battle, small and personal in scale, but just as dangerous. Things look bad for them, barricaded in their house, cut off from help and under alien assault. But something is looking out for the Hess family. A number of seemingly random and unnoticed things—Merrill's high-school home run records, Bo's obsession with scattering half-full glasses of water everywhere—suddenly come together to protect the family from harm. And Graham Hess has to reassess the mysterious workings of the universe.
Although some viewers weren't ready for an alien-invasion movie without blockbuster effects like Independence Day's famous demolition of the White House, Signs was a monster hit at the box office in the summer of 2002, grossing some $400 million worldwide. And, as with Shyamalan's earlier hits The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, Signs has been released under the "Vista Series" imprint Disney uses for high-end DVD releases. The movie includes a single disc with an hour-long sequence of documentaries on the making of the film, deleted scenes, animated storyboards and the traditional clip of one of "Night's" early homemade movies.
Sometimes less is more—but not this time
On first viewing, Signs seems simpler than Shyamalan's previous films, focusing mainly on suspense to see just how tightly it can wind the audience up. Very tightly indeed, as it turns out. But thinking too much about the movie afterward isn't advisable. The message—basically "everything happens for a reason"—gets murky quickly if taken beyond the borders of the Hess farm. And the grade-Z 1950s monster movie Shyamalan grafts it onto is so silly that viewers are tempted to guess that the surprise ending this time will be that the whole thing's a hoax.
This DVD presentation of Signs is as understated as the movie, and can be equally exasperating. What's there is good. The documentaries cover things like preproduction, scoring and special effects. The longest is Shyamalan's discussion of the shoot itself, and all are interesting. The deleted scenes are mostly brief: wordless flashbacks of Graham's wife, an ominous dead bird by the road. The one actual "scene" is an extension of the battle to secure the house before the characters retreat to the basement. It adds to the film, but doesn't change it.
The storyboard overlays are harmless, but not especially interesting. The "Night's Home Movie" this time is of his first "alien" encounter. As always, these clips are charming, but they could bear to be longer. There's also a rather ridiculous offer to "register" the DVD online. This feature promises a replacement disc should some disaster befall the original—and presumably a lot of ads in the mail.
Finally, this is the third straight Shyamalan film to hit DVD without a commentary track, from the director or anyone else. It's starting to look like Shyamalan just doesn't want them there. Perhaps he believes talking over the movie is wrong, and discussions of it should be conducted separately. The absence hurts this film less than his more complicated previous works, but it's still a shame.
Overall, there's nothing on the disc that's actually bad, but it does offer pretty thin pickings, especially compared to previous Shyamalan films. This is the first Vista Series package to come on a single disc, and the MSRP is a bit much for what's included. On the other hand, the disc is available almost everywhere for a bit over $20. It looks as though Disney is offering a standard disc, at the standard price, and just using the Vista Series tag and pretended higher price to draw attention.
