Signs - signs
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Signs - signs |
| Original title | Signs |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 2002 |
| length | 102 minutes |
| Age rating |
FSK 12 JMK 14 |
| Rod | |
| Director | M. Night Shyamalan |
| script | M. Night Shyamalan |
| production |
Frank Marshall , Sam Mercer , M. Night Shyamalan |
| music | James Newton Howard |
| camera | Tak Fujimoto |
| cut | Barbara Tulliver |
| occupation | |
| |
Signs [ saɪnz ] (Original title: Signs ) is an American science fiction film from 2002 . Directed by M. Night Shyamalan , who also wrote the script. The main roles were played by Mel Gibson and Joaquín Phoenix . Signs addresses the phenomenon of crop circles and an impending alien invasion of Earth . The film opened in German cinemas on September 12, 2002.
action
The former pastor Graham Hess lives on a farm with his two children Morgan and Bo and his brother Merrill after the accidental death of his wife, through which he lost his faith in God. Merrill, a failed baseball player , moved in with his brother after the accident to take care of him. Bo has obsessive-compulsive disorder and distributes countless full glasses of water around the house; Morgan is asthmatic .
One morning Graham discovers a 200-meter crop circle in one of his fields. As a result, more mysterious things happen: the family dog attacks Graham's children, strangers seem to be roaming the farm, more crop circles appear all over the world, and bright lights are discovered over major cities. It is becoming increasingly clear that aliens are planning an invasion of Earth.
Graham, Merrill and the two children fear an attack on their farm in the face of the strange events. Ray Reddy, the person who caused the accident that killed Graham's wife, tells Graham that he is keeping one of the aliens trapped in his house's pantry and that he suspects they might shy away from water. Then he drives to a lake. Graham goes to Reddy's house, comes into contact with an alien through the crack in the pantry door and is able to cut off two fingers of his opponent after he tries to reach for him. When he returned home, after some back and forth, everyone decided to hide in the house and board up the doors and windows. When the aliens penetrate the house, the only thing left for the family to do is to escape to the basement.
As the next morning breaks, Merrill hears on the radio that the aliens are retreating. Now they dare to venture out of their refuge, want to get Morgan his much-needed asthma medication and expect that the invasion is over. But one of the aliens has hidden in the house and takes Morgan. It's the same thing Graham cut off two fingers. The alien sprays a poison gas in Morgan's face, but is shortly afterwards attacked by Merrill with a baseball bat and killed by the water Bo distributed throughout the house - the aliens' deadly weakness. Morgan survives because his asthma prevented the poison gas from entering his lungs.
Graham now realizes that all the strokes of fate that happened to his family were only part of a divine providence, regains his faith in God and becomes a pastor again.
Emergence
Shyamalan came up with the idea for a new script while filming Unbreakable in 2000. After that, he began developing the concept for his next film. According to Shyamalan's statement , Signs was influenced by Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds , the horror film The Night of the Living Dead and the science fiction film The Demonic . According to Shyamalan's ideas, the script should have “meaning, tension, emotion, humanity, a global meaning and a universal message”. The title Signs has two meanings: on the one hand the crop circles as a sign of the aliens, on the other hand the belief and the existence of heavenly signs.
After writing the script, he contacted the production company Touchstone Pictures ( The Walt Disney Company ), which accepted the script. Shyamalan was able to win Frank Marshall and Sam Mercer as producers. Mel Gibson was hired for the role of Graham Hess; Merrill Hess was played by Joaquín Phoenix. The director expanded his usual cameo to a supporting role: He played the accident-causing Ray Reddy.
The film was shot from September 13th to November 29th, 2001, among others in Morrisville , Newtown and Oxford , Pennsylvania , USA, and in Fremont, New York , USA. The Hess family house was rebuilt in Victorian style ; the crop circles were actually laid out in a field, as Shyamalan is reluctant to use CGI effects .
In the post-production, Shyamalan had to use computer animation: Originally, the movements of the aliens were supposed to appear feminine. For this, recordings of the movements of a woman were made and used as a basis for the behavior and movements of the aliens. However, the aliens did not seem threatening enough, so their appearance was subsequently changed. Shyamalan had initially planned to keep the aliens invisible, but in retrospect he decided it would look too much like science fiction and trick photography. So he adopted another idea that the aliens' skin is mirrored.
Although Shyamalan pleaded for little music overall and originally had no music intended for the scary-looking sections of the film, he was ultimately persuaded by composer James Newton Howard to include more musical underlay than planned.
Staging
Visual style
“I feel more connected to the older filmmakers than to today's. Instead of showing the killer with the bloody knife in his hand, I rely on sounds and lighting, or on something that moves, which makes the victim realize that someone is there. "
This stylistic approach is essential in Signs . The horror in this film has "nothing to do with visual values, but with suggestion". The extraterrestrials are mostly only recognizable as shadows, but above all acoustically perceptible and are represented by "grabbing hands that come out from under the door". In addition to the aliens, the filmmaker creates an eerie atmosphere and tension through “night walks in the cornfield, through strange signals from the baby monitor”, through a “light wind” and a barking dog.
The camera work works with “fragmented and very limited fields of view” and deliberately breaks through the silence of the film with rapid tracking shots. “This leads to a rhythm that supports the topic of attempted isolation and the breaking in of chaos”. The camera also follows the gaze of the protagonists, "even if it is just looking at a wall behind which threatening noises can be heard as evil approaches". As a result, only the nervous barking of the dogs can be heard, which suddenly stops completely after a howl. When the Hess family barricaded themselves in the basement, they and the audience only heard "scratching and knocking noises".
dramaturgy
The film tells "the encounter with extraterrestrials [...] not through excessive air battles, but simply refuses the actual appearance of the aliens for most of the time and thus avoids - justified by setting and figure constellation - the conventional methods of science fiction or invasion films". The supernatural, in the case of aliens, is dealt with through the protagonists' "inner confrontation with them, and above all through their attempt to evade the threat".
It was also noted that the film “draws on the dramaturgy of the stories of the future, often produced as cheap B-movies”, if at the end of the film the alien invaders “react allergically” to the element water, “then it takes succinct, almost incidental ones Victory over the highly intelligent super creatures from space revives the skepticism of many science fiction films from the 1950s. ”The film scholar Cynthia Freeland also sees a deeply rooted belief in the end of the film; Charles Martig, Film Commissioner for the Catholic Media Service, points to the balance of references to Christianity and values of American society in interaction with the worldview of Hinduism .
Editing, sound and music
"I think music is too often used as a support in films, just as bad storytelling is often whitewashed with [many] cuts."
To avoid this, Shyamalan cuts as little as possible and relies on long camera settings. The method cannot be overlooked in Signs . He also tries not to put too much music under it. As in all of his films, sound and noises play an important role and support an eerie atmosphere as well as dramatic moments of shock. Kreuzer analyzes: “ Signs lets the wind pull through the cornfield all the more energetically, the closer the danger approaches. This is made up of the noises of the wind chimes on the veranda, which ring gently at the beginning, but in the course of the film only fidget and clink in the wind, overwhelmed.
Grossing results
Signs grossed over $ 60 million on the US launch weekend, making it the most successful launch in Touchstone Pictures history. In the Federal Republic of Germany, 834,464 viewers were counted in the opening weeks, so the film is behind The Sixth Sense , Unbreakable (one million each) and The Village (over 900,000). After eight weeks, the film had grossed $ 408.2 million worldwide. The film was a financial success measured against the film's $ 72 million budget and is Shyamalan's second highest-grossing film after The Sixth Sense . The figure on the right illustrates the worldwide box office results in various countries. The viewer ratings in the Internet Movie Database were rather average with 6.7 out of 10 points (July 2013).
reception
criticism
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In the United States, critics were largely praiseworthy for the film (74% of the collected reviews on Rotten Tomatoes ), but not as pronouncedly positive as two years earlier for The Sixth Sense (85% ibid). Roger Ebert , renowned film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times , gave the film the maximum number of points and justified it as follows:
“ Signs is the work of a born filmmaker who evokes a premonition out of nowhere. When it's over, we don't think about what happened, but how much we experienced it […] At the end of the film, I was amused to see how much Shyamalan lets redemption fall. He knows [...] that such film endings gradually tire. "
Charles Martig said the director was using "popular genres like science fiction, mystery and horror", breaking them up and "reorganizing them into a multi-layered narrative". The turning point at the end creates “a fundamentally new view of things, quasi a cinematic illumination that moves the film experience into a new horizon”, which is much further “than the narrative plot would suggest”. In Signs, Shyamalan is now reaching “the limits of his narrative universe”: The sophisticated composition can “when viewed at any time lead to the realization that the author actually knows everything” and he simply wants to refer the viewer “via a subtle narrative to a deeper dimension ". In this respect, “a fantastic trilogy of popular metaphysics comes to an end” here. Daniel Haas wrote at Spiegel Online that with Signs “one of the most successful directors in Hollywood is sending a clear message.” It refers “directly to the cultural mandate that America repeatedly gives itself” to “convey clear points of view in a world of growing complexity” . There is "a lot of creative potential in this task" and "a great horror".
Carsten Happe from the magazine Schnitt , however, sharply criticized Shyamalan. The director is "an alien and a threat to earth". The “annoying slowness of his films” “incessantly subverts the Hollywood maxim of faster, bigger, more”. The size of the story holes "increasingly exceeds that of the crop circles, which are at most publicity-laden hooks that are completely dropped after a few minutes". Instead, Shyamalan tries "permanently and unsuccessfully to build up arcs of tension that are constantly lacking in resolution".
The film magazine Cinema was of the opinion:
“With Shyamalan, the end of the world takes place as a chamber play, limited to a farmhouse - finally to the basement, in which Hess and his family barricaded themselves against evil. Knocking noises behind the wall. Shrill beeps from the baby monitor. Claw fingers under the crack in the door. A dog that barks frantically in the open air, howls pathetically, and falls suddenly silent. Signs is an oppressive paranoia study, suspense cinema in its purest form, a kind of walk into the coal cellar without light. Whistling hardly helps: What we don't see has always frightened us the most. "
And the lexicon of international films judged that the “story that had been suspended for a long time” lived “on the director's talent for eerie atmospheres” and that “the spiritual component came to the fore more than the fantasy story that gave rise to it”. The film is "captivating and stylistically interesting" but remains "ultimately unsatisfactory because the subject matter is not deepened enough".
Awards
- ASCAP for Best Score (James Newton Howard)
- Bogey Award
- The German Film and Media Evaluation FBW in Wiesbaden awarded the film the title valuable.
further nominations
- Saturn Award for the best science fiction film
- Bram Stoker Award for Best Screenplay (M. Night Shyamalan)
literature
- Zywietz, Bernd: See dead people: M. Night Shyamalan and his films , Edition Screenshot Volume 1, Mainz 2008, ISBN 978-3-00-025297-6
Web links
- Signs - signs in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Signs - signs atRotten Tomatoes(English)
- Pictures of the film on the Cinema website
References and comments
- ↑ a b c d DVD : Signs --zeichen (Making Of (characters search - screenplay))
- ↑ DVD: Signs --zeichen (Making Of (set characters - storyboard & film set))
- ↑ a b DVD: Signs (Making Of (Special Effects))
- ↑ a b DVD: Signs - Zeichen (Making Of (Sounds of Signs - Music & Effects))
- ^ A b Daniel Haas: Signs - characters: horror in its purest form. In: Spiegel Online. Retrieved December 29, 2008 .
- ↑ Kreuzer, Marco: The dramaturgy of the uncanny in M. Night Shyamalan , p. 37
- ↑ a b c Charles Martig: Signs. In: Medienheft. Retrieved December 29, 2008 .
- ↑ a b Kreuzer: The dramaturgy of the uncanny in M. Night Shyamalan , p. 51
- ↑ a b Kreuzer: The dramaturgy of the uncanny in M. Night Shyamalan , p. 49
- ↑ Kreuzer: The dramaturgy of the uncanny in M. Night Shyamalan , p. 50
- ↑ "Mars Attacks!" - Or the unrepresentable enemy in American films. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Retrieved December 31, 2008 .
- ↑ Cynthia Freeland: Horror and Art-Dead . In: Stephen Prince (Ed.): The Horror Film . New Brunswick, New Jersey, London 2004, p. 194
- ↑ Kreuzer: The dramaturgy of the uncanny in M. Night Shyamalan , p. 52
- ↑ Kreuzer: The dramaturgy of the uncanny in M. Night Shyamalan , p. 70
- ↑ Weekend Box Office by Signs . In: Box Office mojo. Retrieved December 29, 2008 .
- ↑ DVD: Signs (US marketing campaign for cinema release)
- ↑ M. Night Shyamalan: The best starting weeks. In: Inside Kino. Retrieved February 18, 2009 .
- ↑ Box office of Signs . In: Box Office mojo. Retrieved December 29, 2008 .
- ↑ As of January 2009
- ^ Foreign Box Office by Signs. In: Box Office mojo. Retrieved December 29, 2008 .
- ↑ a b Signs at Metacritic , accessed on July 13, 2013
- ↑ a b c Signs (2002). (No longer available online.) In: Rotten Tomatoes. Archived from the original on December 7, 2008 ; accessed on February 17, 2009 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b Signs. In: Internet Movie Database . Retrieved July 12, 2013 .
- ^ Roger Ebert: Review: Signs. In: rogerebert.com. Retrieved December 28, 2008 (English): “M. Night Shyamalan's Signs is the work of a born filmmaker, able to summon apprehension out of thin air. When it is over, we think not how little has been decided, but how much has been experienced [...] At the end of the film, I had to smile, recognizing how Shyamalan has essentially ditched a payoff. He knows, as we all sense, that payoffs have grown boring. "
- ↑ Daniel Haas: Signs - characters: horror in its purest form. In: Spiegel Online. Retrieved December 29, 2008 .
- ↑ Carsten Happe: Signs. In: Filmzentrale (originally in the magazine Schnitt). Retrieved December 29, 2008 .
- ↑ Critique of Signs. In: Cinema. Retrieved December 29, 2008 .
- ↑ Lexicon of International Films: Filmjahr 2002 , Schüren, p. 324 - ISBN 3-89472-346-7
