(February 2004 update: I just bought the DVD of this film and will update and re-write this review in light of this further information. Likewise, I have a word to say about "The Passion of the Christ")

What's my bottom line? I thought SIGNS was BRILLIANT! It was INSPIRED, and went right over almost everybody's heads, just as intended. 

I think M. Night Shyamalan is a genius. His movie is heavy with deep symbolism that effectively manipulated us at a visceral level, while at the same time informing, more intellectually, those of us who have eyes to see his giftedly shrewd agenda. In short, we can - and indeed must - think for ourselves. 

First a little personal history. In 1992 I read an article in SCIENCE NEWS, about some of the underlying geometrical features, revealed by Professor Gerald Hawkins, encoded within crop circles. It was he who also discovered the now suppressed anachronistically advanced mathematics underlying Stonehenge. 

It was obvious that, contrary to the facile meteorological origins advanced by Time Magazine, there was an advanced intelligence involved who knew far more about Euclidian geometry than anybody on this planet. I was stunned. Extraterrestrials were now initiating open contact!

 That was the first of my two revelations, and provided the context I needed for seeing through the despicable disinformation campaigns, which churn out a wealth of "swamp gas" type explanations and make my self-appointed mission to inform my fellow Earthlings about the impending ET involvement so difficult. With hindsight, it also may have gone a long way to making intractable our Internet whistle blowing problem with revealing local, state and federal government corruption.

 The second revelation was when, in a flash of insight, I recognised that - when viewed holistically - the forms in fields called crop circles graphically elucidated Doctor Rupert Sheldrake's astonishing hypothesis of Formative Causation, which has since been explained by Professor Thomas Bearden "Sheldrake's morphogenetic field is a species quantum potential, and the charged-up Whittaker structure is the inducing agent."

 So when I learned last year that Disney was filming an US$80 million Hollywood blockbuster related to crop circles starring Mel Gibson, I excitedly recognised it as nothing less than a major historical event and I could hardly wait to see it.

 Nuclear physicist and crop circle researcher Professor Eljo Haselhoff has estimated that less than 1% of the First World knew anything about crop circles, and I knew, if nothing else, Mel Gibson was going to change that forever.

 Although the movie is a huge box-office success, being the season's top earner, the initial reviews were predictably disappointing, and feedback from those of my acquaintances who had seen the movie was largely even more negative. Knowing the heroic Disney involvement with gingerly lifting the lid on the hidden truth about UFOs with their toe-in-the-water 1995 television documentary, I had hoped there might be more to this movie than met the eye. In this regard I was not disappointed.

 Please remember that in 1974 the Plejarans told us they were here "to create controversy" among Earthlings - a necessary prerequisite to our tender enlightenment about our true place in the Universe. They also instructed us that we had to think for ourselves. Shyamalan's SIGNS forces us to do this.

 Our protagonists are two affable and mildly mentally retarded adult brothers within a plot so full of mind-numbingly illogical story devices that even those of us who swing our arms in unison when we walk and breathe through our mouths are bound to stop and try to think. Stopping and thinking is the aim of this movie, and its author communicates at a subtle symbolic and deeply allegorical level.

 Incidentally, Mr. Shyamalan, who was born in India but grew up a Roman Catholic in Philadelphia, plays the cameo role of the ill-fated rural motorist who falls asleep at the wheel of his gargantuan sports utility vehicle, accidentally fatally pinning our hero's beloved and pretty young wife against a tree.

 Here are just some of the many logical problems with the film that even a child should have picked up.

 Like the Wicked Witch of the West, water is anathema to these invading ETs, but they've come to eat our babies, who are about 95% water last time I checked.

 They plot a course through numberless parsecs of outer space, but require crude visual navigational aids in fields in order to coordinate their terrestrial harvest. "Makes sense", declares our thick hero's even thicker athletically handsome but physically flawed younger brother.

 They can read our minds, thus anticipating our every move, but communicate verbally with each other by radio on the same amplitude modulated part of the UHF electromagnetic spectrum employed by wireless baby monitors. (And were the tinfoil anti-ESP pixy caps simply abandoned as too much of a distraction?)

 They arrive essentially unarmed (aside from little poison gas squirters on their wrists) to engage in "hand-to-hand combat" ostensibly because they don't want to provoke, by massive thermonuclear retaliation, the destruction of the planet they've come to capture. (Seems like there might have been some middle ground, like broomsticks or flick knives.)

 They demonstrate a level of advanced technology that renders their hundreds of sophisticated spacecrafts invisible to radar and then even visible light, but choose to travel on foot. By the way, where are our defence forces while all this is going on? What do we pay them for? It's left up to a bunch of Third World villagers to figure out how to fight them. When we finally get a poor look at the (ONE!) scary space monster, he's a seven foot tall steroids abuser in a Spiderman costume who still can't bust his way out of a broom closet even after all those reps at the gym. The list is endless.

 But my favourite scene is when the two brothers valiantly board up the wrong side of the door, although watching them dimly seeking the disused coal chute in their own basement was pretty funny too.

 Did you notice that the U.S. Army didn't come off too well for a change? The recruiter was a slathering pop-eyed loony who was signing up a scum-of-the-earth type right from central casting. Significant.

 And did you notice the glimpse of our CSETI logo? Very significant.

 What baffles me is - even in these days when a Sydney toilet block costs a quarter of a million dollars - what did the US$80 million get spent on? It sure wasn't the special effects. We saw one guy in a poxy costume - no panicky crown scenes at all - the extraterrestrial vehicles were just stationary (!) lights in the sky which even conveniently rendered themselves invisible as soon as the sun came up - and we didn't even get any computer generated demolition of major metropolitan landmarks!

 So how much money did Mel get for his acting efforts, and how much does he REALLY KNOW about the proposed hoaxed threat from space? Is it simply a coincidence that his current movie project is about the man known as Jesus?  And is it also merely a coincidence that Mel's daughter just publicly announced that she has forsaken the world of the flesh to become a nun?

 All in all, I give SIGNS five stars for being all things to all people. It's clever enough to fool the dim-witted majority component of the military/industrial oligarchy, by providing the requisite nightmares for children of all ages, but most importantly, it provides the catalyst for an on-going grass roots interest in the phenomenon popularly known as crop circles, which will advance the noble mission of our ET friends from their protectorate in the stars in a powerful way that they are ethically restrained from undertaking themselves.

 Thank you, M. Night Sayamalan, Walt Disney Studios and Touchstone Productions, for your wise, unique and inestimably valuable contribution to our planet's belated and gentle enlightenment.

Here is a webpage which provides a two-page major newspaper review of SIGNS from the SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

And here's a collection of reviews: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0286106/externalreviews