For all those who can believe in crop circles, and those who only wish they could, this is not the answer to a prayer. M. Night Shyamalan, the writer and director of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, certainly takes a serious approach. So much so that you might imagine the grim cast of characters labored under the impression they were in an Ibsen drama. There are reasons for that: the hero, played by Mel Gibson as a change from Bruce Willis, is a backsliding cleric whose wife was killed six months earlier in a roadside mishap, details of which are leaked out in dribs and drabs. In the end, the ponderous, portentous forward progress of the film, together with its charged atmosphere of Domestic Tragedy, proves to be, as it were, all approach and no (or very late) arrival; all heavy-handed foreplay and diminutive climax. Shyamalan does not lack intensity or concentration, and he is capable now and again of touching a sensitive spot, prompting a tremor: the first glimpse of an alien appendage disappearing into a cornfield, or the attempt to get a look at the shadowy prisoner locked behind the pantry door, or the siege in the cellar illuminated only by flashlight. Unhappily, the filmmaker, more cursed than blessed by his Sixth Sense, seems more concerned now to be a spiritual leader than a mere storyteller. Somehow, when alien invaders descend over the entire planet, the crisis of faith of one grieving widower in rural Pennsylvania is apt to seem small potatoes, no matter how symbolic or symptomatic of all mankind. And the confinement of most of the action to the family farm — like some Roger Corman grade-Z science fiction of the late Fifties — is ultimately stultifying. To be sure, the portable television, whenever the strictly monitoring father (no longer "Father") allows his children to watch it, serves to widen the scope, at least in our imaginations: the proliferation of crop circles in India (too fast and far apart to be a conspiracy of hoaxers), the strange lights suspended over Mexico City, the network broadcast of a Little Green Man's cameo appearance in a birthday-party home video, etc. One of the TV viewers is tactless enough to remark, "It's like War of the Worlds." We wish! With Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, Abigail Breslin, Cherry Jones. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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