What's interesting about M. Night Shyamalan is that he's some kind of genius, but he doesn't make you angry the way other young geniuses do. Shyamalan is 31 years old, and yet he's already written and directed five motion pictures. Even so, you don't want to kill him the way you sometimes want to kill other prodigies who seem to have cornered the market on talent and luck.
That might be because his third film, 1999's The Sixth Sense, was just so good in so many unexpected ways that Shyamalan has earned himself an enormous reservoir of goodwill. It might be that his follow-up to The Sixth Sense, the gorgeously dark but ultimately unsatisfying Unbreakable, was neither a huge success nor a flop — which proved Shyamalan was not simply basking in God's grace. It could be because Shyamalan's new picture, Signs, proves Hollywood is capable of releasing a spooky and amusing scary movie without needing to show the mutilated body of a naked teenage girl hanging out by the patio to score a shock.
But really, Shyamalan is likable because he's ambitious in an old-fashioned way you can't help but admire. His ambition is to be a great storyteller. And he understands that all sorts of elements go into great storytelling. The storyteller must be a master of mood. He must create resonant characters who stand in for his audience and whose journey becomes the audience's journey. And since every tale has already been told a million times, a great storyteller must take something familiar and retain the comforting aspects of its familiarity while still making his tale seem fresh and new.
In Signs, a Pennsylvania family coping with a recent tragic death must survive an alien invasion. The last hour of the movie is a very original confabulation of a haunted-house picture and The War of the Worlds. But that's not what's special about Signs, even though Shyamalan works the alien-house angle in such a way that the movie is just scary enough to be fun without being deeply disturbing.
What's special about Signs is that it's not really a movie about aliens or about haunted houses. It's about predestination. It turns out that everything we see happen in the movie is in the movie for a reason.
Signs is a good movie, not a great one like The Sixth Sense, because Shyamalan can't quite get a fix on his characters. He adopts an amusing conceit by having Mel Gibson's 11-year-old son serve as the stand-in for the traditional science-fiction character of the scientist who explains everything that's going on. But in doing so, he turns the little boy into a comic character — and when the child is facing mortal peril, we don't empathize with his pain as we did with Haley Joel Osment's in The Sixth Sense. (Granted, that's a pretty high standard, considering that Osment's performance in The Sixth Sense was the greatest feat of child acting ever recorded on film.)
And the movie really would have been better if Shyamalan had cast Bruce Willis rather than Mel Gibson in the starring role. Willis's wonderful underacting, which elevated both The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, would have worked far better than Gibson's unfortunate recent penchant for scenery chomping.
There's a lot of talk in movie circles that Shyamalan is obsessed with trick endings because he devised the trick ending to end all trick endings with The Sixth Sense — and came up with a pretty lame trick ending to conclude Unbreakable. But the trick ending of The Sixth Sense wouldn't have worked if we hadn't grown to care about the characters played by Willis and Osment. And the ending here isn't a trick so much as it is the answer to the argument posed throughout the movie about the existence of miracles.
Shyamalan understands that we can appreciate and feel for characters in pain far more easily than with characters who lead happy and contented lives. But he doesn't exploit the pain of the characters he creates. He sets up believable situations for them and offers them a measure of resolution at the end. Plus, he's the only director in Hollywood who understands and respects the consolations of religious faith. And he's a pretty decent actor to boot (he plays a key role in Signs).
Yes, I'd like to hate Manoj Night Shyamalan. I admit it. But how can you really hate someone who really has earned all the praise and love and money and fame that have fallen upon him like the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath?

— Mr. Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post.