Samsung 4k Signage

Discover Samsung's new 4K UHD Signage display for the best UHD resolution with intelligent UHD upscaling technology.

There’s an old saying about the concerns of giving someone enough rope and they’ll end up hanging you with it. That could almost be said about audiences with M. Night Shyamalan’s career in the early 2000s! Before he went to The Village, took a dunk with The Lady in the Water, or smelled the breeze with The Happening, we gave Shyamalan a lot of rope with The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs. With the uncanny knack for combining personal human dramas with traditional genre fare, the director burst onto the scene with a trifecta of box office blockbusters and a reputation for clever storytelling that commands attention to this day. Not the best of the three big hits, Signs is nonetheless a heartfelt drama about a family processing their grief while coming together under incredible circumstances. I’ll dispense with the recap of the plot since by this point most folks who care have seen Signs already. While I don’t think it’s a flawless feature, I think it still stands as one of Shyamalan’s best. The principal fault I have with the film is this is about when the writer/director dynamo started putting a lot more weight on convenience. Now, that’s part of the trick for this film, it asks the audience to question what’s happening. Do you believe these are conveniences and random events or do you have faith that that nothing is random or convenient? But that’s the clever part about Shyamalan’s earliest films, he’s inviting the audience behind the curtain to see how the magic works. Later films would be a lot less clever, and the conveniences far too much of a stretch to bend for. Anchoring Signs is a genuinely strong human drama about a father coming to terms with the death of his wife, the loss of his faith, and somehow trying to raise his two children in the process. In this film, Mel Gibson delivers one of his best everyman performances. He’s not inspiring an army. He’s not dislocating his shoulder to get out of straight jackets. He’s not traveling the wasteland looking for gasoline. He’s just an average farmer. And when otherworldly events arrive as crop circles in his cornfield, he must confront his issues if he and his family are to survive. With Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin as his two children and Joaquin Phoenix as his aimless younger brother, we have the perfect character mixture for this suspenseful alien invasion story to play out. And boy howdy is it suspenseful! What I love most about what Shyamalan manages with Signs is how he steadily ramps up the suspense. It starts slowly with kids screaming in the cornfield and builds to a shadowy figure standing on top of a barn. Then it breaks out and makes this small isolated incident a global phenomenon but then pulls back tight to the family unit so that something as innocent as a baby monitor can ramp up tension. As a post-9/11 film, it deftly touches upon our collective obsession with news updates and the stress of trying to explain the unexplainable. But then, there’s the whole “water” thing. I’m not going to go into that just on the off chance there’s anyone interested in this disc who hasn’t seen it already, but in the universe where our Alien Invaders exist, they probably picked the worst planet to conquer. It’s the weakness of Shyamalan's over-explaining to make some of the faith vs convenience themes work that holds Signs back from reaching the heights of The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable. But compared to some of his later films, these stumbles are mere bumps in the road that you can easily travel over and still enjoy the finale. As a whole I really enjoy Signs and it’s a film I come back to every couple of years. As a father, I now relate more to Mel Gibson’s Graham than I did in my 20s adding another level of appreciation to the film. I love that the action plays out at an isolated farmhouse as a fitting tribute to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. I enjoy that we really don’t get a great look at our alien invaders until the last possible moment ensuring we’re more afraid of what we don’t see. And then I think the sound design of this film was impeccable. So yeah, not Shyamalan’s best, but far away from being his worst. Vital Disc Stats: The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Signs invades 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray courtesy of Disney in a new two-disc 4K UHD + Blu-ray + Digital set. The 4K is pressed on a BD66 disc with a repressing of the old 2008 BD-50 disc to serve up the 1080p and extra features. Both discs are housed in a standard sturdy black case with identical slipcover artwork.