Photo Courtesy of Touchstone Pictures Mel Gibson looks for some "Signs" of life in his movie career. "Signs" opened Friday in theaters everywhere.

Alien thriller crashes to the ground

Itās a sham! A hoax!

Itās all about getting people excited to see the "Sixth Sense" again. But this time the little boy in the movie should say: "I see aliens!"

After seeing the previews, itās easy to want to like this movie. It looks intriguing and fun and scary. But those are just the previews.

In fact, the previews are better than the movie.

"Signs" is the new brain deformity of M. Night Shyamalan, who of course wrote and directed the "Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable." Well whoop- de-do.

Not only is this movie a major letdown, it is a major letdown with great actors in it. So where does the fault lie for this mediocre excuse for a movie? Itās all in the writing.

Mel Gibson plays a priest turned atheist named Graham Hess who lives with his children, played by Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin, and his brother Merrill played by Joaquin Phoenix.

The story starts out with the children missing in the cornfields of Hessās farm.

Upon finding the children, they also discover that a huge crop circle has appeared overnight.

Two days later there are strange lights and more crop circles appearing all over the world. But Hess refuses to believe that something is about to happen.

What goes on in the movie after this point are a few roundtable discussions full of slapstick humor and goofball antics that just donāt fit well in a suspense/thriller movie.

There is an entire lack of suspense in this film, which made it so poor.

The movie poster says rated PG-13 for some shocking moments; with the emphasis on some, as in not more than five, because that is about all this movie delivers.

Whatās in that bush? BANG! Everyone jumps and then it ends up being just some harmless noise.

The time spent on poor humor and silly jokes could have been used for some more character development to make this film more believable.

Or maybe, they could have put some suspense in the film to make it scary instead of using quick camera angles to make people jump.

And of course in a Shyamalan film you have to have that surprise ending. The ending where everything is all tied together into a nice pretty little bow. Well this ending is so contrived that it hurts to even watch.

Everything in this film has some really obvious significance that let Shyamalan come up with this ridiculous way to make his movie end.

Now the previews are telling you not to see this movie alone. The only reason for this is probably so the movie industry can get the millions of dollars out of peopleās pockets before people realize this movie was not worth their time.

Surely movie critics will have rave-reviews about this movie because it is "cool" to like Shyamalan and think he is a great director. But every great director has one big flop. Or in some cases two, right Mr. Lucas?