Fixing movies: Signs

Let’s start with the arrogance of the title: fixing movies.

There are, of course, a whole lot of movies that I personally would have loved to have seen go differently than what happened. I would’ve preferred Call me by your name to have ended happily. Or, if it were up to me, the kid in Dinocroc wouldn’t have died.

Yes, I watch a whole array of different films.

But these are all choices made by the director. My personal preference or opinion gets in the way.

However, sometimes a movie has a ‘happy mistake’ that I can use to make the movie more to my liking. One of these movies is M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs (2002). Obviously this article is filled with spoilers for the movie.

Signs is a peculiar case of a movie. Because it is actually very good. The story is grand. The acting is fantastic. But it all tumbles down with the (so-called) ‘twist’ before the end.

Spoiling the story for you (you should’ve seen this movie by now) it appears that the aliens invading earth are lethally allergic to (drum roll please) ‘water’.

Water...the key element to life on other planets. Water...the one element that our silly little planet earth has such an abundance of that it often just falls from the sky.

So here we have a superior alien race that decides to use all its advanced technological knowhow to fly lightyears towards a planet on the outskirts of the universe that actually consists of the one substance they are allergic to. And, of course, because that’s how the superior alien race union of workers decided, the aliens invade without any protection –naked.

Basically the minute the ‘twist’ lands Signs becomes laughable after the fact. The aliens –who inspired fear and tension for the first hour of the movie- are suddenly demoted to a ‘guy who, drenched in gasoline, visits the sun’. Stupid beyond believe!

This hurts the movie so tremendously that everything that came before this ‘twist’ becomes obsolete. Every great acting scene, every beautiful shot is diminished because ‘aliens can’t take water’.

So how to fix this movie?

The simple answer would be to change the water into any other kind of substance. Be it cola, motor oil, Red Bull. It doesn’t matter. Any other liquid would’ve been fine.

But I like to take a different approach!

The story of Signs is all about a priest who lost his faith after his wife died in a car accident. He is doubting the existence of God.

Or, maybe, the ‘goodness’ of God.

Signs is a movie that has a religious strand woven through throughout. The story is about faith, predestination and believing.

The son can’t inhale the toxic gas (in the finale) because of his asthma (predestination).

And the father ‘believes’ that, due to this, his son will be alright.

So –this is how my mind works- what does a priest do, amongst other things? He blesses water. A priest can make water holy.

So why not have the daughter ask her father time and again to bless the glass of water she is holding? And supposedly he humours her and makes a half-hearted hand-gesture and mutters some words to make it holy (even if he doesn’t believe -he is a priest after all, he has the power).

Now all the water-filled glasses in the house contain ‘holy water’.

This would make the finale consisting of the evil aliens being some sort of ‘spawns from hell’ intolerant to holy water.

It would also insert some notion of the entire family being religious.

Something that is strangely lacking in the movie (due to the detached father-character).

But that’s not enough for me!

M. Night  loves to ground his fantastical tales in reality. A boy named Cole sees dead people (in the Sixth Sense). Does he become a superhero? No! M. Night calls the psychiatrist –as it were.

David Dunne realizes he’s ‘unbreakable’. Does he go to Pakistan to kick Al-Qaida’s behinds? No, he fixes his city and stays low-key.

Keeping this in mind I would add some ‘murkiness’ to 'my -above mentioned- twist' of Signs. This would invovle just a short news item playing in the background that the tap-water in the region has been contaminated by chlorine. Then the viewer sometimes sees the main characters occasionally drinking water from a bought bottle instead of the tap.

Now, to me at least, the finale becomes interesting. The setting is still the same. Mel Gibson still tells Joaquin Phoenix to ‘swing away’. But the water could be, at the same time, holy (thus God exists) or just filled to the brim with an unnatural chemical which the alien being can’t abide.

I think that this would fix the movie. It would create a rather nice ambiguity between religion and science without making the invading aliens ‘stupid after the fact’.

I still love Signs. It truly is a great movie. But the movie gets hurt (very) badly by the last act. In a perfect world M. Night would’ve thought of the same sort of things I’ve written above. I, honestly, believe that my suggestions would make the whole of the movie more logical, ambiguous and –in the end- better.

Then again, the man didn’t realize the ‘twist’ in ‘The sixth sense’ until his fifth draft of the story.

We are all human!