- Technically not entirely true. If they can make stuff, like starships or power armor, that doesn't make them smart, but they also used starships, so they understand (at least) basic principles of mechanics. They seem to understand human psychology when they take hostages. Like monkeys. Stupid - yeah, but not as stupid to be incapable of making power armor suits and using them. Yet they fail...
- The ones who built the starships, and the ones who fly them, are the ones who understand at least basic principles of mechanics. The ones who were down on earth might actually just be cannon fodder. Or to put it another way, majority of us don't know how to put together an airconditioning unit, much less an airplane or space shuttle. Why should they?
- Why would they have sent down cannon fodder so dim they can't get past a locked door? What did they expect would happen? Do the smart aliens enjoy watching the dumb aliens get beaten up by primitive humans with baseball bats and glasses of water?
- The ones who built the starships, and the ones who fly them, are the ones who understand at least basic principles of mechanics. The ones who were down on earth might actually just be cannon fodder. Or to put it another way, majority of us don't know how to put together an airconditioning unit, much less an airplane or space shuttle. Why should they?
- Actually any species advanced enough to invent Interstellar travel will have modified their genome to increase intelligence. Its discussed in Stephen Hawking's Universe in a Nutshell. Artificial wombs would have to be used however as the increased brain mass would make normal childbirth impossible.
- No, just no. Hawkings pet beliefs about about aliens are hardly more credible than anyone else's.
- What if they had ethical concerns about that huh? Like, say, our own society would have?
- Or they realised it was just unnecessary and economically unsound? Like our society would have if it were more cynical?
- Our intelligence has not improved, no. But our knowledge has increased. And we have, in fact, become more intelligent by proxy. We do not become more intelligent, but our machines can, and have.
- You don't even need sapient AI. By the point you have starships that can go to another star system any smartphone would be able to tell this invasion plan is full of holes.
- Or, when we so cruelly ignored their begging for food, they decided we were nonsentient and decided to treat us as food. (They make a mean jerky.)
- This sounds an awful lot like the plot to Alien Nation.
- Unfortunately, if this were the case, we probably couldn't help them — almost all our food contains water. And the I'm a Humanitarian thing probably wouldn't work either.
The aliens are incredibly unprepared for an invasion. Therefore, they were bred on Earth as part of a Gambit Roulette by some organization to create a one world government or some other lofty goal. There was nothing more to it than genetic engineering, puppetry, bribery, and sophisticated light shows.
- Yeah, it's the "best" way... just like how the U.S., Russia, China, France, etc. all put aside our differences to battle our common enemies in World War II. And afterward we all stayed friends and held hands and sang Kumbaya. Oh, wait...
- Yep, we all know Hitler was an extraterrestrial. Someone decided to whip up another one...
- Well, I think the idea is that the threat should persist indefinitely, thereby keeping everyone constantly united and fighting against it.
- And all this was orchestrated by the smartest man on Earth.
- No. It's all just a ploy by the soda companies to sell more soda! Or perhaps more Dasani water.
- Hmm, from another world, seemingly supernatural powers, water harms them... witches from The Wizard of Oz, anyone?
- What, you mean with the little girl in the sparkly red shoes? And the guy who's scared of everything, and the guy who isn't in touch with his own emotions, and the guy who's smarter than he looks? Nah, couldn't be The Wizard of Oz...
- Primitives with invisibility-capable spaceships?
- That isn't an invisible spaceship, it's alien hoodoo magic.
- Problems with this: Rapture itself is a leaky underwater facility, which would've been likely to kill anyone unfortunate enough to have an allergy to water - though admittedly, that would make a strong incentive to leave. And BioShock was released well after the film, which means M. Night Shyamalan must be the precog he tried to tell us he was in Lady in the Water.
- We will pay for laughing him off. He was our best hope to prevent us from being alien snack food.
- It's Beavis And Butthead: The Alien Version. "Uhh huh huh... Let's take dad's spaceship for a joyride to the place they told us never to go!"
- Or their smarter ancestors made the spaceships a la Idiocracy. This is their version of suburban sprawl. And the next moon mission is gonna prove deadly for the astronauts.
- My God, Bill Hicks was right all along.
- This is actually the best hypothesis, as most of the rest could be rephrased as this. Smart aliens would use proper weapons or communications, environmental suits, spectrometers etc., or they would just synthesize anything they want.
- This theory might hold more weight upon further inspection. No mechanical technology is shown to be used by the aliens, and organic alien suits have precedence in Independence Day, so it wouldn't be too far fetched in an alien movie. I know one movie is not the other, but let's suppose it for this theory. They could be using these organic biosuits for camouflage, nerve gas delivery, and general body protection including respiration as noted by the troper above. We see no rayguns or other mechanical technology to hint that their technology is anything other than organic. Their ship may even be organic for all we know. If this were true, maybe the aliens were harvesting humans to assimilate human biochemistry into their organic technology, eventually allowing them to live in a water rich environment.
- Even better: mass ritual suicide. The crop circles are sacred markings they make for the ritual. They then descend, hoping to be dissolved to enable them to reach the highest heaven after death.
- Furthering this WMG, crop circles, and random dead livestock have also been attributed to demons in the past.
- This also explains all the problems with water being their weakness. If the demons were put on Earth as a test of faith (i.e. God gave every faithful-at-some-point person a clue to help them against the demons, sometimes killing their loved ones to do it), it makes sense that these demons wouldn't be killed by anything that could be rationally guessed.
- ... why? He didn't give us brains to weight our heads.
- The only time water was shown to burn the aliens was from stagnant water in the house of a lapsed by never formally defrocked priest. It's Holy Water.
- This theory is further supported by the news reports of the battle turning around in the middle east. A area not known for its abundant water but plenty of religion.
It's not likely that that a race that evolved on another planet would be as humanlike as the aliens in Signs. The starship builders created humanlike life forms, and made them water soluble so that they'd die quickly. The crop circles and the invaders were meant to communicate something to Man. We don't understand the message because the Starship Builders' culture is too alien for us.
Morgan mentions when reading his book that space-travelling aliens would be physically small, with large heads, because their intelligence would overrule the evolutionary need for physical strength. However, the aliens that invade are physically large, with proportionally average heads. It's probable that these aliens were genetically-engineered slaves created by the smaller, more intelligent aliens (presumably The Greys) that Morgan's book refers to. This would explain everything. The aliens don't seem particularly intelligent, despite having spaceships, because they didn't build the spaceships, they just stole them. They are naked and unarmed because they never had clothes and weapons to begin with, having escaped their planet in a hurry. The guy on the radio at the end says, in exact words, : "people say they came here to take over the planet. That's bull. My friend and I saw them. They poisoned his family and dragged them away. This was a raid. They came here for us; to harvest us. We're lucky as hell they're leaving." It could not possibly be made more clear to us that the aliens weren't trying to take over the planet; they came here to perform a mass abduction, presumably as food for the rest of their journey or for the use of slave labour to build a colony wherever they chose to settle. It was just a stopover while they continued on the run from their Masters. Being unarmed, their method of attack relied on stealth and the element of surprise. Though it was physically possible for them to break down doors, being unarmed, they knew that was a bad idea, because the humans would easily be able to defend themselves. That is why they were snooping around Graham's house the nights before the invasion. They were looking for alternate entry points to the house that they could use to ambush the family on the night of the invasion. As Graham realizes when they are in the basement, the aliens aren't actually trying to break through the door, they are just banging on it to make noise as a distraction, while the other aliens sneak in through the alternate entrances (the attic door and the coal chute) which they had scouted out previously. Once the family blocked both entrances to the basement, the aliens gave up because the element of surprise was now gone, and they didn't want to risk just barging through the door, because they knew the humans were probably prepared to defend themselves. In this sense, the aliens did not actually lose the invasion; they collected the number of humans they deemed necessary and left. The improbable water weakness was probably a trait genetically engineered into them by their Masters to make them easy to defeat in case they tried to rebel. The aliens did take whatever precautions were possible to avoid it (Ray mentions there are no crop circles near large bodies of water).
So they dump the galaxies idiots on our doorstep with a mandate to raise hell and they will be richly rewarded, on the off chance they succeed, and then sit back to see what happens. Then if the earth proves capable of fending off the idiots they start figuring the level of risk based on the results they observed to mounting a real full scale invasion.
Things the aliens may have been doing other than invading:
- Hunting humans for sport.
- Undergoing a
manhoodalienhood trial. - Messing with a primitive planet on a dare.
Whatever they were doing, the aliens intentionally handicapped themselves—choosing a planet two-thirds covered in water and limiting themselves to hand-to-hand combat—to show off how tough they were.
Think about it. They went to a planet that was covered in poison with no protective gear and with the worst invasion strategy ever. The kidnappings were retaliation for attacking their ambassadors.
- Or their First Contact manners are similar to the Minbari's."Open the Gunports, nothing can go wrong!"
- Just like the South Park pilot:Alien: We have experimented with all the beings of Earth, and we have learned that you are the most intelligent and wise.
Cow: Why did you turn some of us inside out?
Alien: Oh, that was Carl's fault. He's new.
Alien (Carl): Yeah, sorry about that, my bad!
- Why not mine some comets, or an Ice World like Europa?
- Because of the last WMG - they're idiots.
- They are mining comets, but comets are a lot smaller than Earth is. They can't mine Europa because there's no way for them to get leverage — there's no place on the surface of that moon that isn't outright water. We can walk on black Hawaiian lava if we're willing to melt our sneakers, but we can't touch the red lava. For someone who can't touch water, the difference between farm fields and ice balls is similar.
- If they wanted water, even if it absolutely had to be from Earth, why bother getting out of the ship at all? They could just fly in over the middle of the Pacific, lower a pipe, and pump the hold full. Or if it had to be fresh water, they could go in over one of the ice caps and use a crane. There's no need to expose fragile alien flesh to the horrible death world in the first place.
- Water is actually the second most common molecule in the universe.
- Not in their corner of it.
- Water is H2O. Hydrogen is actually just a proton and electron. It is everywhere, it is produced by stars and radioactive nuclei. Lots of oxygen was made when population III stars gone nova, which spread across universe - there are no pop. III stars now, so everything is made of them. That means lots of oxygen and even more hydrogen everywhere.
- Hungry aliens attacking humans, and later a much more effective species that hunts them shows up? Now, if the xenomorphs show up, the predators' and xenomorphs' blood will react and neutralize into water, which is harmful to the Signs aliens, so all we'd need to fight them off is a storm of firework arrows for shrapnel.
- Bob: "Hey George, let's go down there and run around naked so we can scare the natives who've never encountered life from other planets."
George (the more cautious of the two, pauses): "I don't know. That planet is covered in acid."
Bob: "Don't be a pussy."
George (beginning to be quite annoyed at Bob's remarks, agrees): "Hey, I learned this trick from Steve that drawing circles in their food supplies really freaks them out."- Sounds like the same kind of guys that Ford Prefect hitched a ride with when coming to research Earth for the Guide.
What better way to create a suicide mission than to send the underling to a planet covered (about 75%) in what will literally eat then him/her/it alive. The other troops were probably recruited from prisons, asylums and amongst the dregs of their society. How can their equivalent of coroners complain when there are no remains (melting away during the first rain storm)? Those in charge knew; the troops were told they were to procure Di-hydrogen-monoxide by any means necessary. Society was told that they were tragic losses while on an exploration mission to a deadly planet with barbaric inhabitants.
- Does that mean the Aliens' leaders essentially did to them what the Irkins did to ZIM?
- Death by Flouride isn't much better.
- Death by Chlorine is good, though.
- Or herbicide! (Our protagonist lives out in the country.)
- It did take place in rural Pennsylvania. Hydrofracking chemicals aren't completely identified.
- Flouride seems like the biggest possible culprit, the aliens do have skin with a coloration similar to solidified chlorine. If there skin is chlorine based rather then what humans have it would react violently with liquid containing Flouride. Since Flouride isn't naturally found in such high levels in fluids, after all it's natural state is usually as solid crystals and mineral deposits.
- Our skin is made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen and sulfur and it's not black with clear and yellow streaks. Element chlorine would react with fluorides (releasing fluorine gas, which is unpleasant), but chlorine compounds wouldn't.
That could have been their first encounter with water. Hydrogen may be the most common element in the universe, but oxygen is a good deal rarer. Or maybe they're only hurt by water above a certain concentration; their breathing on Earth is a lucky coincidence they discovered by trial and error.
- That does not change the fact that water is the most common chemical compound in the observable universe, second in sheer mass only to stars.
- Yet more evidence for the "aliens are stupid" theory.
- Could be a combination of the two.
- After the humans win, they erect a statue to commemorate the victory. The statue depicts a lone firefighter wearing a gas-mask, fire axe in one hand, severed alien head in the other.
- So, the Pyro is just training? I knew his insane beliefs meant something!
- Again - sodium reacts with lots of things. It's not really viable for building anything.
- This could mean the aliens are demons.
- However the news did mention the aliens not appearing around large masses of water, so it's not just holy water.
- Though it's possible that beings with a weakness to holy water would just avoid all large bodies of water as a precaution, since there's no guarantee that they would have any way of knowing which water was actually blessed until they were actually doused with it (which could potentially kill them).
- I've always been inclined to believe this theory, but it's important to note that it would require a rather looser definition of "holy man" (or "holy woman") than most works tend to give. It could mean that some people are just naturally anointed by the Divine without their knowledge, for reasons beyond their comprehension.
- The news never says that. It's only Ray who says that.
- Or, alternately, there is no minimal dilution of holy water, and enough of it has gone down the drain into rivers and oceans that every drop of water contains some of it. Which can also explain the resistance to water vapor...it only counts if it's holy water. Holy water vapor and holy ice don't count, it's a supernatural rule, it doesn't have to make sense.
- And it's possible they didn't quite understand this problem until they got here, which would explain why they came, but then a few of them touched water and realized what was going on.
- If we are going to accept that in the movie God exists and intervened to save the family, it's also perfectly possible that he also blessed ALL the water on earth so we could fight the demon invasion.
- From a Christian theological view point. God does not cause any sort of evil, though He can work any bad situation to good. God doesn't break a leg to fix a paper cut. From a Maltheist theological viewpoint - yes, God really is that much of a dick.
- God didn't send the aliens, He just set things up so Graham's family could be saved. (Granted, sans wife, but it is possible that her death had to do with something besides the alien invasion. Possibly him just being a dick.)
- Remember that it wasn't just Graham's faith that saved him, it was the faith of the Middle Easterners that saved the entire frickin' world. (The primitive method of defeating evil the newscast referred to obviously must have been holy water.)
- This is basically a heavily softened (his kids live and God doesn't yell at him for complaining) retelling of Job. Whether it counts as evil or not depends on if you grant Omniscient Morality License and nothing else.
- Nowhere is it etched in stone that the entire invasion takes place solely for Graham's sake. There are generally numerous reasons why things happen. That's part of the whole point of there being no coincidences: everything is interconnected. The world doesn't revolve around one person, you know.
- Grahm's wife certainly died to save their son from an alien invasion though, which is still a dick move on God's part. As if the brother couldn't figure out to hit an alien with a baseball bat if that hadn't been her dying words.
- It's easy to think it was all solely for the purpose of restoring Graham's faith, since he's the main character and all, but really, if you think about it, it's very likely the invasion would provoke a similar reaction across the world once the full implications became clear. The creatures eat Humans, which are 60% water, yet water melts them. It makes no scientific sense. And what do you call something that makes no scientific sense but it happens anyway? A miracle.
- Not necessarily (does love make scientific sense?) - also, the whole losing/regaining faith is very... Hollywood Atheist and Evil Stole My Faith sort of missing the point.
- Shyamalan's character said he felt that the accident could only have been caused by God. This could a Red Herring (and projection of guilt on this character's part), but it does sound like the death was God's doing.
This also might explain why Morgan is asthmatic and generally sickly throughout the film, but after one shot of alien nasal-spray and a quick nap clears right up (possibly leading to the most energetic reading of "Dad?" in the entire movie).
The entire invasion might be a retrieval operation for hybrids. After all, the radio reports did say they were dragging off people. The spacemen might have mistaken the humans' attempts at saving their loved ones for those of kidnappers grasping at their hostages, and acted accordingly.
- You fail biology forever.
- Wait, you expect legitimate biology from an M. Night Shyamalan movie?
Graham's wife had a psychic vision, which is why she knew to tell Merrill to swing away. Bo inherited her gift. She is paranoid about the water because she knows it is harmful to the aliens, she has a bad dream shortly before the invasion begins, and she says "I dreamed this" during Morgan's asthma attack. Morgan is aware of her abilities. During the telescope scene, when she says she's worried, he asks her "did you have one of your dreams again?"; the "dreams" he is referring to are actually visions. However, Morgan keeps this secret from his father because he knows his father's loss of faith would cause him to discourage them from believing in Bo's visions. So at the dinner scene, he refers to Bo's vision as "a bad feeling" so that his father won't question it, but Bo clarifies that it was a "dream", or vision.
- This could also explain what Morgan meant by "you let mom die." Maybe Bo had a vision that Colleen was going to be hit by a truck, but Graham dismissed it as a dream and didn't stop her from going for a walk that night. Graham then went into denial about heavenly "signs" because he felt guilty over her death. And it would explain Morgan's resentment when Graham once again refuses to heed Bo's warning during the dinner scene.
- Too bad the one he found was already part alien, what with the water weakness an' all...
Next we see the invasion. The news program shows an alien peeking into the window of a children's birthday party. The alien is causing no harm here, it is only curious. Sure, the news stations claim there have been reports of abductions, but we do not actually see them occurring. This is just wild rumor and mass panic by the general public in the face of a cultural invasion. We see the kids at the farm house hiding in the closet, wearing tinfoil hats, and obsessively watching the news because they are driven by ignorance to panic and take irrational actions.
At Shyamalan's house, an alien enters his home and he locks it in the pantry. Again, from the alien's perspective, this is probably not a malevolent act. The aliens have interplanetary travel, they could do better than send one unarmed alien into his house if they wanted to cause him harm. In return for trying to make contact, the poor guy gets locked in the pantry. Then Mel Gibson goes in there, and the terrified alien reaches under the door to reach for help. In a panic, Gibson slices off one of its fingers.
At the end of the film, the young boy has an asthma attack and loses consciousness. The family then sees on the news that the aliens are leaving Earth en masse because water is poisonous to them. Next, a lone alien breaks into the house and the family sees it has the unconscious boy cradled in its arms. A closer look reveals that the alien is missing a finger. It is the one from the pantry, left behind by its own people on a strange world. And yet, when faced with the one who cut of its finger, it still has the kindness of heart to heal the boy by spraying a mist in his face. Gibson then tells his brother to brutally beat the alien with a baseball bat, which he gladly does. The unarmed alien offers no resistance. Shortly after, the young boy awakes, thanks to the alien's antidote. Gibson and the family show absolutely no remorse for the brutal murder of the one who saved the boy. In their ignorance, they interpreted the alien's act of kindness and forgiveness as an act of aggression, and they killed him simply because he wasn't human.