Plot in one sentence: Crop circles precede an alien invasion and human soul searching.

Extras:

• "Making of" documentary (58:54). A reasonably thorough account of the film divided into six parts: "Looking for Signs" (6:11) promoted as a "DVD diary," "Building Signs" (8:02), "Making Signs: A Commentary by M. Night Shyamalan" (22:33), "The Effects of Signs" (8:31), "Last Voices: The Music of Signs" (8:26), in which James Howard Newton is extensively interview, and "Full Circle" (4:48), about the promotion of the film. The feature can be played all at once or scene selected. What gets short shrift in all this promotion is the excellent sound production, from the clicking sounds of the aliens to the strange humming sound environments during scary sequences.

• Five deleted scenes: "Graham and Merrill" (a 65-second chat between the brothers that develops character but not plot) ;"The Flashbacks: Scene #1" (23 seconds) and "The Flashbacks: Scene #2" (36 seconds); "The Dead Bird" (a soundless 21-second sequence of three panning shots of a car driving past a dead bird); "Alien in the Attic and the Third Story" (at five minutes seven seconds, the lengthiest deleted scene, from the sequence just before the family is driven into the basement).

• Night's First Alien Movie (2:19): An excerpt from a home video called Pictures, made by the neophyte filmmaker, and introduced by Shyamalan. It is predictably privative, but it is unclear whether the music score from the clip is from the original film.

• Storyboards: Multi-angle Feature Two "animated" storyboards, with multi-angle options to view the finished scene, and with three audio options, the full soundtrack, the music score only, or the effects track only. "Graham, The Knife, and the Pantry" (2:58) and "Graham and Merrill Chase the Unknown Trespasser" (2:13). Basically filler.

• Register Your DVD: CD-ROM invitation to sign up on line for a disc-replacement program and promotions.\

Somewhere in the many interviews with or profiles of M. Night Shyamalan, the writing-directing auteur comments on the fact that a less-than-apparent formula guides the creation of huge commercial hits—and he has discovered it.

He won't reveal it, but it's possible to roughly distill that formula in reverse from Shyamalan's films. First, you take a once popular genre now in some stage of disrepute (ghost stories, comic book crime fighting, alien invasions). You come up with a plot that's like an expanded version of a TWILIGHT ZONE or ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS episode. You cast a major action star attempting to "stretch his talent," and embed his character in a disharmonious or troubled family. Finally, you add the dollop of a "twist" ending, a narrative surprise that gets the crowd yakking as they leave the theater.

You put this all together, then you promote the hell out of it.

Shyamalan is a new kind of director. Like Quentin Tarantino, he displays a reasonably hip surface manner disguising an underlying conservatism, and seems to love all aspects of movie making, from the brow-knitting frustrations of conceiving the screenplay, to the stumbling blocks and puzzles arising from working on a set.

It also helps that Shyamalan loves to talk about himself. The director and the Industrial Promotion Complex are a perfect fit. He could go on for hour after exhausting, self-regarding hour about the bedeviling problems and elegant solutions that a given movie offers him—and on this disc's "making of," he does. He's really fascinated by his scripts, his movies, himself. No mirror exists that has not been befogged by the hot breath of the fey Shyamalan.

For the most part, Shyamalan's films are expert pieces of commercial filmmaking. They are generally well-acted, have fine music scores (usually by James Newton Howard), are well-photographed (here by Tak Fujimoto) and are well-paced and well-edited. His lat three films were placed on the moviemaking conveyor belt and come out looking clean and homogenized and ready for consumption.

So beguiling is the surface of his films that sometimes a takes you a second to remember just what they are "promoting": belief in ghosts, God, aliens, crop circles, and superhuman beings. Earth to Night: hey, none of this shit is real!

In SIGNS, for example, the film takes at face value the idea that crop circles are truly mysterious manifestations of supernatural activity. Shyamalan says on the "making of" that "no one has taken credit for them," but this is not true. The director says this in defiance of revelations in 1991 that the original crop circles were a hoax perpetrated one night by two drunk and playful Englishmen named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley (go to the crop circles website for examples of their expansive vegetarian installation art).

Naturally, the hoaxers were accused of playing a hoax, even though they demonstrated their techniques, using planks of wood and ropes, on national television. Crop circle studies continue unabated, and SIGNS is its X-FILES. This digging in of the heels in the face of debunking was demonstrated again only recently when the guy that made up Bigfoot confessed to the hoax on his deathbed, an announcement greeted by Bigfoot "scholars" as no cause to abate the continuing search for the ever-missing "missing link." Perhaps Bigfoot will star in Shyamalan's next movie, a semi-mystical version of HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS. (For a full examination of the crop circle phenomenon consult an article in Skeptical Inquirer magazine.)

Worse, the movie makes assumptions about the audience's religious prejudices, taking the kind of extreme stance on issues such as predestination and sacrifice that would be laughed at in a four-wall exhibition of a Billy Graham movie. It's difficult to image a God who would kill your wife just to leave a few hints as how to foil an alien invasion (and aren't the aliens God's creatures, too?).

Shyamalan is like the movie studio chiefs of yore, refugees from the Cossacks and only a few paychecks away from the shtetl who (cynically?) made pabulum to sate the mindless hunger of the "flyovers," manufacturing nice stories about bucolic small towns starring Jimmy Stewart or Mickey Rooney. It's not clear what Shyamalan's religious views really are— he was technically born in India but raised in Philadelphia by wealthy doctors, and went to a private Christian school before going to NYU's film school—but in the end it doesn't matter because there is usually a comforting variance between what moviemakers believe, if anything, and what they think viewers believe. Thus, while sipping their champagne in glass-walled houses in eyries overlooking Los Angeles, Hollywood's Satanists conceive of movies in which the little people embrace their simple faith in order to preserve their meager social structure.

One suspects that Shyamalan knows the commercial realities all too well. "There's a side of me that's a hard core big businessman," Shyamalan says on the "making of." There's also a whiff of the cynic about Shyamalan's projects. Poll after poll reveals that the majority of Americans believe in the biblical God (just as the majority of Icelandians believe in elves). It is unlikely that Shyamalan would make a movie about a kind atheist who dies quietly in his sleep after years of loyal service to the local Socialist club. He knows that most moviegoers just want to go out and see something old-yet-new, be joyfully scared, have their sociological assumptions flattered, and then go home and forget about it.

The other Frank Darabont, Shyamalan is mining the horror and supernatural realm, but in his case it is after flopping badly with two autobiographical early films back when he was a creature of Miramax. But the supernatural element is also the thinnest, less lasting part of his movies.

SIGNS does have some very good parts. Visually, it's clean (Shyamalan's signature visual trick seems to be a lateral camera movement that reveals what's going on in the world beyond the frame). Throughout, the cast is very good. Joaquin Phoenix is endearing as the failed minor league baseball player come home to aid his family. Stage actress Cherry Jones is reassuring as the Bucks County cop. Rory Culkin (playing Morgan Hess), like his brothers, is one of those preternaturally natural actors. On the other hand Mel Gibson, who is basically good as Graham Hess the fallen minister "hating" God for what He has done to his family, is fitted into a role where he must emote every three minutes. When he cries and writhes, he's like a Mr. Potatohead animated by Will Vinton: every facial part must move! (Incidentally, the film almost starred Paul Newman and Mark Ruffalo instead of Gibson and Phoenix.)

There are some nice moments, too. When the clan is exiting the family car, and Morgan screams "Stop," little sister Abigail Breslin's startled take is impressively realistic. And by the way, Shyamalan himself is a surprisingly good actor, in a small part he wrote for himself.

Shyamalan's three "good" films to date form a sort of trilogy, meditations on families in crisis (perhaps Night also thinks of them as a trilogy; he admits in the "making of" feature that he has no current project brewing, which he portrays as an unnatural state of static inactivity, like a warrior come to weary rest after the good, town-cleansing fight). The family parts of his movies are fine—touching, sensitive, dramas that portray real issues in family life. And they can be funny (SIGNS is actually unexpectedly hilarious, like PSYCHO). Unfortunately, these elements are buried in a sump of the most tendentious kind.

In an essay on John Ford in his book-thumping, movie-hatin' volume The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson notes that "Adherence to legend at the expense of facts will ruin America—the work is well under way. And lovers of the movies should consider how far film has helped the undermining…To take Ford properly to task may be to begin to be dissatisfied with cinema." In terms of M Night Shyamalan's Fate magazine level fantasies, you have to ask yourself at what point does movie fun end and serious problems with a film's transcriptions of reality begin. The surface tension of Shyamalan's movies is oft times near perfect. But right under the surface there are deep depths of intellectual corruption.

E-MAIL THE AUTHOR | ARCHIVES