Signs

Signs arrives as a pre-digital-age artifact, a time capsule from when cinema could still concern itself with the mechanics of suspense rather than the audit of its own sensibilities. The film follows a family of white rural Americans defending their farm against extraterrestrial invasion, a premise that contains almost nothing of the cultural preoccupations that would later dominate the industry. Mel Gibson plays a former priest whose faith is restored through crisis, a narrative choice that might have seemed quaint even in 2002 but now reads as almost defiantly apolitical.

The casting is unremarkable in the way that mainstream American films were unremarkable in the early 2000s. Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, and Abigail Breslin are all white, and their presence in the film reflects no apparent consciousness of representation beyond the practical matter of bankable talent. The only female character of note is Cherry Jones, whose role as a neighbor barely registers beyond the margins of the narrative. There is no discussion of systemic anything, no interrogation of power structures, no acknowledgment that the world might contain people who were not present in the theater's imagined audience.

The film's approach to its subject matter is refreshingly literal. Aliens are aliens. Water is water. A family is a family. There is no subtext about climate change or the exploitation of labor, no metaphor for late-stage capitalism lurking beneath the crop circles. What we are left with is a straightforward exercise in genre mechanics, executed competently and without apology. In the current landscape, this absence of cultural consciousness reads almost as an act of rebellion, though it was merely the default operating mode of blockbuster filmmaking two decades ago.