More than any film of 2002, the conclusion of M. Night Shyamalan's Signs -- just out on video and DVD -- requires a re-examination of the two hours of celluloid that flickered before. This ought to be no surprise to those familiar with Mr. Shyamalan’s first major film, The Sixth Sense, where the sly director cloaks the most important piece of information about Bruce Willis until the final scene. But Signs’ ending is even more subversive: Rather than force the audience to scrutinize characters’ interactions with each other, it instead compels them to reconsider the hero’s relationship with his God.

Mr. Shyamalan successfully hides his thesis -- that God is a predeterministic God, unremittingly fiddling with the dials of the universe to bring back that one lost sheep of 100 -- until he’s good and ready to reveal it. Signs starts as War of the Worlds with a static, one-family P.O.V: Mel Gibson is Graham, an Episcopal priest who's lost his faith after the death of his wife. Crop circles appear on his farm and across the world. The cause: Aliens. (One of Mr. Shyamalan’s best decisions was to have much of the alien sighting and paranoia shown through Graham and his family watching television, just as most of the world would see a [relatively] small-scale alien attack.) The aliens attack the areas near the crop circles and then, of course, eventually come to attack Graham and his family. And then, and then, and then...

I must say no more about that finale. I loved and was shocked by the ending of Signs — the most out-of-left-field ending in a film since frogs fell from the sky in 1999's Magnolia — and so I do not then intend to ruin the denouement for unprepared readers. (That said, those who wish to know no more about Signs should read no further.) Needless to say, God had an explicit hand in Graham’s family’s victory over the mean ol’ aliens, and the specific way that God gave Graham the victory over the aliens returned his faith in Him. But it goes much further than that: In a twist that recalls a religious version of 1997’s The Game, Mr. Shyamalan implies that virtually every action, quirk, and event that takes place during the timeframe of the movie -- and some before -- took place for the singular reason of returning Graham’s faith. The alien attack, Graham’s brother’s minor-league baseball career, Graham’s daughter’s refusal to drink a full glass of water, his wife’s last words: If you believe Mr. Shyamalan at face value, all of it set in motion by a God who wants nothing more than Graham’s redemption.

But one must choose either to not believe Mr. Shyamalan at face value or to conclude that Mr. Shyamalan needs to rethink his religious beliefs. It is not ridiculous to believe that God would influence certain actions to help return Graham’s belief in Him. It is ridiculous, however, to believe that God would put the entire world in jeopardy for the sake of one ex-believer, which is precisely the scenario played out in Signs. (God might leave the 99 to save the one, but it’s a bit harder to imagine Him leaving the 6,300,000,000 to save the one.) The beauty of Mr. Shyamalan’s microscopic look at the world is one can imagine the alien invasion having a positive impact elsewhere in the world, too: Bringing together divorced couples, saving children from drowning, starting new line-dance crazes. But that’s simply conjecture: There’s nothing in the text of the film that implies a net positive gain from the invasion, and much that implies death and destruction. Surely God could have a better plan to save Graham’s soul than that.

Better, then, to view Signs as allegory: As long as you jive with Mr. Shyamalan’s belief that there is a God and that He is behind certain “coincidences” -- and I do -- then the ending works on a preposterous yet giddy level. It’s absurd, yes, but knowingly so and lovably so. And the film is otherwise so accomplished -- one of the best of 2002 -- that whatever theological qualms I have about the ending are more than overcome by Mr. Shyamalan’s visual bravado and narrative knack. It’s a thinking person’s movie. Just don’t think too much about it.

[to be published in the Spring Hill Review for, oh, I guess February 2003.]