It's never a pleasure to watch what looks like a great movie derail all of a sudden. It's not like there weren't "signs" that doom was approaching. But overall, this movie was first-rate, and I thought it would overcome some pretty heavy-handed preaching that cropped up. It didn't. Oh well. It's above-average summer blockbuster material. It could have been more, but that's life. I had originally thought to give it three out of five goats, but an extra day's thought about how patently ridiculous and silly a lot of the plot points really are has resulted in my lowering it to 2.5.

Mel Gibson plays Father Graham Hess, a former Episcopalian minister who left the church for reasons revealed during the film. He lives with his two children, Bo (Abigail Breslin) and Morgan (Rory Culkin), and his younger brother Merrill (Joachin Phoenix), a former minor-league baseball player who didn't know how to not swing at anything that crossed the plate. Things are going fine until one day crop circles appear in his cornfield. He's convinced it's just local kids pulling pranks, because in reality that's what crop circles are (please don't write in with your theories as to why I'm wrong). Gradually, though, he becomes convinced that it might be something more serious, especially after, worldwide, crop circles pop up in record numbers. Things get really weird when shadowy figures that look humanoid start terrorizing his house, the dogs become crazy and violent, etc. All over the world, more signs that this might be the beginning of an alien invasion appear.

Thankfully, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan spares us a lot of the mass hysteria that might be the focus of some writers. He's more interested in how the phenomena affect this particular family, who have already been pushed to the edge by a recent tragedy. The kids, played by Rory Culkin (how many damn Culkins are there, anyway?) and Abigail Breslin, act as both comic relief and harbingers of doom. Shyamalan is great with child actors, and he gets terrific performances out of these tykes. Gibson is solid, working best in the scenes that border on comedy; there are actually some very funny moments in this film, and they do a great job in balancing the tension that Shyamalan is so good at producing. This film is definitely a sign of his maturation as a director, but his reliance on plot twists (thank God there's not one here) and crazy coincidences (too many of them here) is something that he either needs to overcome or temper.

The film's soundtrack is one of the best from a suspense film in recent years. Cleverly, James Newton Howard, the composer, cites the opening theme from Psycho for the opening credits sequence. Some might term this laziness, having the music creep us out by recalling another creepy movie, but I saw it as clever homage; that, and I doubt the majority of the audience has ever seen Psycho anyway. The foley artists (sound effects crew) had a field day with the sounds: a cacaphony of creaks, squeaks, rustling, and pounding on old wood, all of which added to some delicious tension.

Building and maintaining tension is where Shyamalan excels; he should stick to it, instead of preaching or attempting to be profound. As one friend says, profundity is overrated. The parts of the film that deal with basically things that go bump in the night are the best. Shyamalan does a good Alfred Hitchcock impersonation with the early scenes, and the common statement that he is the new Steven Spielberg looks true much of the way through the film. He follows the lesson Spielberg taught with Jaws: less is more. The shark is scarier when you can't see it, and, in this film, the crop circles and things that go bump in the night are scarier when you don't know what's causing them.

The film's first point of weakness was a very heavy handed speech delivered by Gibson to Phoenix on the topic of fate, coincidence, and the loss of faith. Hollywood films believe that audiences need things spelled out for them, instead of letting the events of the plot and the performances of some very good actors explain things. Shyamalan would have done better to leave the soapbox at home. He goes even further in the end, where, just in case you didn't get it the first time around (and how could you not?), he does his Sixth Sense trick of replaying "important" moments for you. He needs to have slightly more faith in viewers, whether they deserve it or not, at least if he wants to keep me happy (something that keeps him up nights, I'm sure).