YMMV / Signs

• Alternative Character Interpretation: The aliens. Their complete lack of armor and weapons is usually cited simply as incompetence, but some more serious hypotheses have been put forward. The default assumption is that we're not supposed to understand why. The movie is attempting to convey an alien invasion not from a gutsy action hero's perspective who blows stuff up and saves the day, but from a normal family who's just trying to hunker down and live through it. We don't understand why the aliens do what they do the way they do because said family almost certainly wouldn't have any clue.
  • One prominent theory is that the aliens were actually peaceful, and only began attacking humans after the humans were aggressive towards them
  • The other most prominent theory is that they were actually demons defeated by holy water.
  • In-Universe, the radio personality speculates near the end of the film that the aliens were only committing a massive raid and not trying to invade or conquer the planet, citing that he saw them drag a man and his family into their ship as evidence.
  • A less serious interpretation is that this was the aliens' version of a frathouse prank, akin to forcing a pledge to try to, say, get honey from a beehive naked or something. Similarly, these are the extraterrestrial equivalent of the cast of Jackass, doing stupid stuff that could get themselves hurt to make their audience laugh.
  • They could also be a race similar to Stephen King's The Tommyknockers, who use all manner of advanced technology but don't actually understand any of it and are actually fairly stupid.
  • Another interpretation, this one explored somewhat by Chris Stuckmann in his examination of the film, utilizes some fridge logic. Why would a race of aliens with a weakness to water travel to what, from their perspective, is essentially a Death World? They're not stupid, they're just incredibly desperate for resources.
  • Still another interpretation is that the alien invasion is really a dream Graham is having as he mentally wrestles with his loss of faith after his wife dies. This would seemingly explain odd scenes like the illustration in Morgan's book that shows people who look like Graham and his children lying dead outside a burning house, the strange conversation with the army recruiter which sounds like something from a David Lynch film, and the alien's weaknesses like water. It's all dream logic at work.
  • Another possibility is that the aliens don't have water on their homeworld and didn't know that it would bring harm to them.
  • Yet another theory, in a more serious twist on the "frathouse prank" one listed above, is that this is some sort of Predator-style hunting challenge or manhood ritual; being dropped into a Death World and made to fight its inhabitants with no protective gear or weapons.
• Awesome Music: James Newton Howard's score. PERIOD. "Hand of Fate" in particular.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The scene in which Graham and the kids come across an illustration in Morgan's book that shows a house that looks just like theirs set on fire, with three people (a man and two kids) lying dead outside it. The scene is pretty lengthy, is filled with ominous music and set-up, and yet it's never explained or brought up again.
• Delusion Conclusion: One theory is that the events of the movie never actually happened outside of Graham's head; he was just dreaming about them as he mentally wrestled with the loss of his faith after his wife died. Adherents point to odd moments like the illustration in Morgan's book that shows people who look like Graham and his children lying dead outside a burning house, the strange conversation with the army recruiter, and the aliens being terrifying yet surprisingly easy to defeat.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Bo's extremely specific aversion to finishing glasses of tap water for fear of it being contaminated could be read as a symptom of OCD. Some viewers have also interpreted her emotional flatness and strange behavior as signs of autism.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • The precise nature of the aliens and the reasons for them invading Earth.
  • How the invasion played out in the rest of the state, the country, and the world.
  • Who (or what) was the mysterious woman in the diner who scared other patrons and then vanished?
• Fridge Logic: How exactly would the aliens have dealt with something like, oh, a rainstorm? Or snowpack in the parts of the world that were experiencing winter at the time? This may be the only alien invasion at risk of getting called off on account of weather.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The scene where Graham finds it hard to cuss and scare intruders off his farm was already funny in the first place. Post Mel Gibson's widely publicized, coarsely worded fits? Hysterical!
• It Was His Sled: It's easy to forget that (apart from the twist) the film originally received praise for its unconventional take on the Alien Invasion story, and for its unique mix of science-fiction, horror, drama, and spirituality. However, it is now better known as "The one about the aliens who can be killed by water", largely due to this Plot Twist being thoroughly mocked by its detractors.
• Memetic Loser: The various versus communities tease the aliens to no end due to their laughably exploitable weakness and apparent obliviousness of said weakness. The aliens have lower survivability odds than Red Shirts, and it's common to see commenters immediately assume they lose any fight featuring them.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The disturbing "It's Behind" scene is probably the most parodied in the movie, due to its over-the-top drama and suspense leading up to the alien's appearance. It was mostly parodied on YTMND, though.
  • The scene where Merrill panics after seeing the footage of aliens on TV has become a popular reaction GIF.
  • The shot of Merrill and the kids wearing tinfoil hats has also been frequently used to mock conspiracy theories and those who believe in them.
• Moral Event Horizon: The wounded alien attacks the house because he wants revenge on Graham for cutting off his fingers. All right, that's understandable... wait, he's going to get revenge on Graham by attacking, with murderous intent, Graham's son? Dick move.
• Narm:
  • The decision to have the aliens be weak to water is widely considered to be a mind-numbingly stupid creative decision that makes the finale unintentionally hilarious. When Graham mentions the water theory, his son even says "that sounds made up." And it's not that he doesn't believe him, it's more like there is NO WAY the aliens could be that stupid.
  • Bo's bizarre behavior fluctuates pretty wildly between being genuinely unsettling and so over-the-top it's goofy.
  • The confrontation with an Alien at the end has a flashback suddenly occur where Graham listens to his wife, in her dying words, list off things to do with his family, where she notes she was just taking a walk before dinner… Graham noting “she loved walks.” Already silly itself, she then makes several requests, seemingly having enough life in her to do so, all topped off with her last one where she asks Graham to tell Merill to “swing away,” which apparently means for Merill to grab a baseball bat and “swing away” at the Alien in this particular moment. Yes, seriously just beating the shit out of the monster is the way to go and our protagonist had to recall a very specific line from his dying wife to initiate exactly that. And that’s on top of the Aliens’ weakness of water being shown in full, too!
  • The famous Brazilian birthday party scene is considered one of the scariest and memorable moments of the movie. However, for Brazilian viewers it can be unintentionally hilarious because: the man who recorded's name is Romero Valadarez (a Spanish name rather than a Brazilian-Portuguese one), one of woman speaks in a Carioca (Rio de Janeiro) accent rather than the local "Gaúcho" accent, a scared Graham screams "Vamonos" (Spanish) to the kids in the television, one of the kids speaks in Portugese from Portugal and then for no reason screams in English "IT'S BEHIND". The Brazilian dub of the movie straight-up dubbed over the boy. On the other hand, the tension of the scene is still praised, and the people from Passo Fundo love that their mostly unknown city recieved such attention.
• Never Live It Down: Signs is actually rated pretty highly on websites like IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic. Still, the average film buff might be forgiven for not knowing that, due to how much infamy the aliens' Weaksauce Weakness has attracted.
• Nightmare Retardant: One of the more infamous cases. The direction surrounding the aliens is genuinely creepy, but by the end of the movie, you realize that you were cowering in fear of a monster with a very unoriginal design, is barely stronger than a normal human, treat a garden hose like a flamethrower and have trouble with pantry doors.
• Older Than They Think:
  • The death of Graham's wife is taken beat for beat from an old Glurge story circulated on the internet.
  • This isn't the first horror movie featuring invaders from another world who turn out to have an unexpected weakness to water. The 1986 cult classic Neon Maniacs featured exactly the same twist (and was also thoroughly mocked for it).
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Tracy Abernathy, the teenaged pharmacist who insists on confessing her sins to Graham (despite him reminding her he isn't a pastor anymore) due to fear of the aliens and can remember every time she's sworn in the last month.
  • The old guy at the pharmacy who writes off the crop circles as a stunt to get more people to watch soda commercials, to the point of keeping precise count of how many he sees, is pretty hilarious and shows up only once.
  • Ray Reddy, the guilt-ridden driver who killed Mrs. Hess, gets an emotional scene apologizing to Graham before revealing he has an alien trapped in his pantry. Ray does appear in two other scenes, but only briefly and without speaking. He's also played by M. Night Shyamalan himself.
  • SFC Cunningham, the local recruiting officer who is a fan of Merrill's baseball career and correctly analyzes the aliens' probing attacks.
• Retroactive Recognition: Little Rock saves the world, by being really, uh, OCD?
• Ships That Pass in the Night: Evidently, Caroline/Graham has a fanfic that teases this pairing while also expanding her character. This is despite the fact that the two only share three scenes together and don't interact romantically.
• Signature Scene: Many people seem to remember the video footage scene the most, due to how terrifying that scene is.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Really, limiting the entirety of the worldwide "invasion" to the Hess farm and making everything an isolated incident that only the Hesses were witness to would've greatly diminished the Narm of the aliens being vulnerable to water. Reducing the number of "invaders" to just this one group of aliens would've given enough room for their incompetence to at the very least seem intentional. It's ultimately the scope that made the aliens look like such idiots.
  • The entire alien invasion lasted less than 24-hours offscreen and we only know that they left the planet because the 6 o'clock news reported it. In a very opportune infodump Merrill informs us after the fact: "It came on about two hours ago. Woke me up ... We won Graham. It went on all night. Everywhere. It was completely a ground battle. Mostly hand to hand. You can't see them unless you're up close. A lot of people died. Some from combat. But most from poison gas inhalation. They secrete it." Filming that would have made an interesting movie, instead whatever tension the film built evaporates (like the aliens themselves), which begs the question: why have a world conquest subplot at all if it all gets handwaved away in a sentence or two? Like the cornfield scene in E.T., the film begins creepily enough (also, like an earlier draft of E.T., Nocturnal Fears, fighting off aliens in a farmhouse has the burden of potential) but the plot seems to splutter the moment the monster shows up. If the alien at the end was out for revenge due to its missing fingers (how did it get out of Ray's pantry?) and could kill the entire family with poison gas why didn't it do that down in the basement? Was it hoping for a this time it's personal confrontational smack-down with Graham?

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