Signs – Nostalgia Critic

Back when people still liked M. Night Shyamalan, but God knows why. It’s time to review Signs.

About Doug Walker

Creator of 5 Second Movies, Nostalgia Critic, Bum Reviews and more.

14 comments

  1. Just watched this again and remembered another thing that pisses me off about M. Douche Shyamalan: He has no understanding of what science is and how it works. How are aliens showing up in flying saucers going to change “everything they wrote in science books”? Advanced technology works under the same laws of physics as outdated machines and tools. It doesn’t matter if a caveman throws a stone or you fire a gun, the trajectories are calculated exactly the same way (velocity, angle, gravity). The ancient Greeks didn’t know there would be a building that’s 2,722 ft high one day, but they already had all the math that’s needed to build it.

  2. One thing that really bugs me is: if these aliens have trouble with wood, how did their ancestors even develop the primitive technology necessary to do anything. It’s not like metal grows and can be harvested in the same manner.

  3. WOOD! That gets me every time!

  4. ok, so if the aliens can’t get through pantry doors, then how did the one alien get in their living room? He obviously got out somehow. We know it was him cause he was missing the two fingers. It seems like the aliens very easily smashed through their boarded up windows, too, so its pretty clear wood is not some impossible obstacle for them. Then people always complain about the water. It seems pretty easy to figure out that the aliens had never encountered water before. The army guy explains the they would send in scout teams to assess the level of danger. Of course why would Doug pick up on this when he is too busy whining about the guy not closing his mouth. This explains why the aliens left so quickly and left behind their wounded like the alien in the pantry. trying too hard.

    • You can see the water from space.
      In fact you could tell the chemical composition of our planet from another solar system.
      P.S. Water is one of the most common molecules in the universe.
      The aliens should have been able to tell that without needing go come anywhere near Earth.

    • If the aliens had such a problem with water, the very least the film should have done is explain WHY. In good sci-fi, the writer would at least explain the rationale behind something like this. A good sci-fi concept would lay groundwork by explaining the aliens’ biology, exploring their motivations (they may be here for resources, food or slaves), and even touching on their technology. Signs could’ve been a good movie if it had done its homework, but Shyamalan is so convinced of his genius that I imagine he didn’t even consider it.

      If the aliens really are affected like that by water, at the least we need to know why. Is it their body chemistry? Is it because they’re from an ammonia ecology and our own is simply toxic to them? Is it because the ‘water’ on their world is actually concentrated acid or alkali, meaning their chemistry is inherently reactive to water? If any of these are true, why don’t they use breathing apparatus? Why are they even interested in us or our planet at all if everything that contains water is toxic? These are just the questions raised from ONE aspect of the film’s premise!

      Put simply: good writers consider the questions their work might be asked be an audience. Bad writers just write whatever they want without ever asking or considering other points of view. This makes Shyamalan an inherently bad screenwriter and storyteller.

  5. TheCynicalChef

    Interstellar travel in spacecrafts capable of entering the atmosphere… but no armor or environment suits. Radar invisibility, but no guns. They made it to the solar system from a world so alien normal aspects of the planet are toxic to them, but were coordinated so primitively they needed crop circles to designate targets. Their ships apparently were impossible to be targeted by normal missiles, but the only weapon we see is a poison gas spray.

    And here’s another thing. Why’d they invade AT ALL? What was the motivation? This is seriously as flimsy as L. Ron Hubbard’s sci-fi, the aliens in Signs are as stupid as the ones in Battlefield Earth. They have technology capable of chemical scans in orbit, interstellar travel complete with teleportation, WHY INVADE EARTH?! Surely if they had advanced enough technology to find an incredibly rare habitable world they would have had technology to scout THE ASTEROID BELT AND KNOW EARTH COULD HAVE BEEN AVOIDED ENTIRELY IF ALL THEY WANTED WAS GOLD! The planet wasn’t habitable to THEM, they apparently lacked the means of terraforming the world, and any rain or someone sneaking a banana into the Psychlo atmosphere could kill countless members of their species.

    Sc-fi really is best left to the nerds, not failed directors and failed therapists.

  6. I view Signs as a portrayal of humanity. The point of this movie is to show that humanity its the most badass, asskicking warrior race of the universe (water resilience, fgs), even though they sometimes suffer from a perceptual bias that lets them interpret unrelated coincidences as an expression of a divine will.

    Makes perfect sense this way.

  7. Damn, this review makes this movie seem so incredibly retarded that I don’t even want to watch it.

  8. He had to little of good movies
    This is not a good movie
    Whats wrong with the kid
    This story is so dumb and people are morons

    Charlie is a good actor and he is wright in the movie

    God is false

  9. Duglau! (Wood!) XDXD It’s so funny!

  10. Doug, there’s more to this movie than you make it out to be. Almost all the negativity you point out towards Signs are from complaints that completely miss the point of the film. All the ‘plot-holes’ you point out require deep thinking. It’s called ambiguity, Doug. Some things should be left with mystery. This isn’t the kind of movie that should be watched with a straight-forward wooden perspective. You really have to think outside the box with this movie.

  11. SpecialAgentDaleCooper

    Ah, M. Night Shyamalan. I do kinda feel bad for him. Even though he made some of the worst films of all time, he also made some pretty darn nice ones.

  12. I recently started to watch the nostalgia critic from the start, so i don’t know if this already been said about this movie.

    I watched another review of Sign wich gave an interesting reading of this movie and cover some of the plot holes.

    THE ALIENS ARE NOT HOSTILE.
    And Mel Gibson and his familly are actually stupid.

    The crop circles? Aliens saw them on earth and though it was a way of communication.

    No weapons and water weakness? Well I gess they didn’t tought human could be hostile (yes this is another plot hole but smaller)

    The doors? They’re locked so without weapon or massive brute force they can’t force them. (yeah the aliens might be stupid too to not bring some tools)

    One good reason for this theory is that we never saw the aliens do something hostile. The poison gas might be that the alien was trying to heal the kid of his atshma, after all he was better after this.

    So Mel Gibson and his familly, who live in the middle of nowhere with their only source of information TV and some shitty sensation book about aliens did assault the alien beacause of paranoia and missunderstanding.

    So yeah with this reading the movie suddenly start to speak about racism (wich could be its true meaning due to Shyamalan background)

    Still the movie isn’t flawless and there’s still plotholes but it’s a better movie with this reading. We’re following gullible idiots who thought they were attacked by aliens and were saved by God…

    (English is not my first language so there might be some mistakes. You can correct them I might help me)

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