Signs (2002)
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
No · Ultra Based
How we score movies →Consciousness Markers
The cast is almost entirely white, reflecting early-2000s mainstream Hollywood norms. Female characters are minimal and underdeveloped.
The film does contain a sermon-like quality when discussing faith and belief systems, though this is presented as character motivation rather than preachy messaging.
Women are largely absent from the narrative beyond domestic roles. The film centers male agency and does not interrogate gender dynamics.
The film is set in rural America with an all-white cast and shows no awareness of racial issues or systemic inequality.
No LGBTQ+ themes or representation. The film contains no same-sex relationships or queer characters.
No environmental themes or climate consciousness. The alien invasion is presented as a threat unrelated to ecological concerns.
The film contains no critique of capitalism, wealth disparity, or class struggle. Economic systems are not interrogated.
No body diversity or body positivity themes. The cast represents conventional physical types without commentary.
No representation of neurodivergent characters or acknowledgment of neurodiversity.
The film is not a historical work and contains no revisionist approach to historical events.
Synopsis
A family living on a farm finds mysterious crop circles in their fields which suggests something more frightening to come.
Why it received this score
Signs arrives as a pre-digital-age artifact, a time capsule from when cinema could still concern itself with the mechanics of suspense rather than the audit of its own sensibilities. The film follows a family of white rural Americans defending their farm against extraterrestrial invasion, a premise that contains almost nothing of the cultural preoccupations that would later dominate the industry. Mel Gibson plays a former priest whose faith is restored through crisis, a narrative choice that might have seemed quaint even in 2002 but now reads as almost defiantly apolitical.
The casting is unremarkable in the way that mainstream American films were unremarkable in the early 2000s. Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, and Abigail Breslin are all white, and their presence in the film reflects no apparent consciousness of representation beyond the practical matter of bankable talent. The only female character of note is Cherry Jones, whose role as a neighbor barely registers beyond the margins of the narrative. There is no discussion of systemic anything, no interrogation of power structures, no acknowledgment that the world might contain people who were not present in the theater's imagined audience.
The film's approach to its subject matter is refreshingly literal. Aliens are aliens. Water is water. A family is a family. There is no subtext about climate change or the exploitation of labor, no metaphor for late-stage capitalism lurking beneath the crop circles. What we are left with is a straightforward exercise in genre mechanics, executed competently and without apology. In the current landscape, this absence of cultural consciousness reads almost as an act of rebellion, though it was merely the default operating mode of blockbuster filmmaking two decades ago.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Critic Reviews
“The work of a born filmmaker, able to summon apprehension out of thin air.”
“If "The Sixth Sense" was Shyamalan's take on ghost stories and "Unbreakable" his ode to comic books, then Signs is the evil cousin to Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."”
“Borrowing heavily from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," Shyamalan tries to lighten his trademark gloomy tone -- and almost kills the suspense he's working so hard to achieve.”
“Sitting through the last reel is significantly less charming than listening to a four-year-old with a taste for exaggeration recount his Halloween trip to the Haunted House.”