(Warning: The Village, Signs, and Unbreakable spoilers follow.)

(Also, pretentious deconstruction ahead.)

In the past, I complained bitterly about Signs being a bad movie because it said something that I believed was the exact opposite of what the filmmaker meant to say. After seeing The Village, I've changed my mind. The meaning I got from Signs is exactly what Shyamalan meant to say.

Shortly after Unbreakable was released, news came out that it was the first of a trilogy of movies. We all thought, initially, that that meant there would be three superhero movies, but were quickly rebuffed. The other movies would not necessarily be superhero movies. They would be a thematic trilogy. I soon forgot, and nothing about Signs seemed to have any relationship to Unbreakable.

But after I saw The Village, another movie that I didn't think worked as well as either The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable, I remembered the trilogy idea and saw the relationship between the movies.

They are all about the choices that are made beyond our control.

As I've previously stated, my problem with Signs is that on the surface, it appears to be ultimately an upbeat story about a man regaining his faith in God, but when looked at more closely, I came to the conclusion that each of the characters in the movie exists solely for a singular Calvinistic purpose: to make Graham Hess regain his faith. His brother's ability and wont to swing a baseball bat very hard, his son's asthma, his daughter's otherwise unexplained prediliction for stacking glasses of water, and his wife's bizarre final words and death all exist for the sole purpose of defeating the aliens, and the regaining of his faith, which seems, not unjustly, more important to the movie. The choices made in the movie were almost nonexistant. They were predestined. I believed at the time that this sorely undermined the uplifting message that the movie was intending to send. I see now that this was the message that he intended to send, and the upliftingness of it was a disguise.

In The Village, the village elders make the decision for all of their descendents, who seem quite numerous by now, that they will continue to live away from the rest of the world. Late in the movie, they are given a clear opportunity to recant their previous decision and let everyone in on the secret, but they again choose to make that decision for everyone else. Even when forced to reveal one secret to an unknowing member of the community, the major one is left hidden, and the decision as to which member of the community is chosen is based not on the abilities of that person, but on the fact that she is much less likely to be able to reason out the rest of the secret. The village elders are completely in control of the choices of the rest of the community.

Which brings me back to Unbreakable, the movie which seemed to have no parallels to Signs. I was wrong. David Dunn had lived forty-five years or so without ever noticing that he was super-powered. He'd had no illnesses or injuries (save one), but he didn't ever really consider it. He could easily have gone the rest of his life without noticing. But Mr. Glass forced his hand. He killed hundreds or thousands of people searching for his counterpart. He forced Dunn to realize what he was. Dunn made the decision to fight crime, and, in fact, later made the decision not to, but his life was drastically changed by forces outside his control. Honestly, I think there's more to be explored here in relation to the choices that Mr. Glass had in the movie. This is also the weakest connection to the theme. (There are flaws in my analysis, but I can't find a better one right now. Perhaps analyzing how he got the powers, and the duality between him and Mr. Glass, including Mr. Glass's choice.)

The differences between these stories is who is making these choices. In Unbreakable, Dunn's choice is made for him by his enemy. In Signs, it is made by fate, or God, or some other force that can be said to be, at least in the context of the movie, neither benevolent nor malevolent. In The Village, the decision is made by the elders, who are intending to be acting for the good of the community and largely for the good of the individuals in the community. But this raises the question of whether intent is enough of a factor to make the removal of the choice a positive action. In Unbreakable, the choice is made by an abject villain. In doing so, he kills many, many people. But he also potentially creates a force for good in Dunn, and also improves Dunn's life itself. It can also be viewed that the killing of the innocents is not directly related to Dunn's revelation, as he is unaware of them both when the realization occurs and when he decides to become a crime fighter. In Signs, the choice is made by forces whose intentions are unknown, if they even have intentions at all. To elucidate, the choices are made for Graham Hess through the means of making his brother a failure in life, killing his wife, and giving his son a life-threatening incurable illness. But it results in saving the family's lives and in making him an apparently more well-adjusted person. So that seems to be both positive and negative. In The Village, the elders are depicted as good people, and are certainly trying to do the right thing for their community. But this means that people will die of easily curable diseases and injuries and the community will remain ignorant of the rest of the world.

I'm not sure what conclusions I can draw from this. Certainly there are drawbacks due to the removal of choice in each case. There are also positive elements. Each removal of choice is made with a different intention, but none of the results is wildly better than any of the other results. Of course, this is not to say that the characters, given the choice, would have had better results, or even that they would have made a choice different than the one that was chosen for them. I think the issue is that the ability to decide was removed. In much science fiction literature, from George Orwell to Star Trek to The Matrix, the ability for people to choose is presented as amongst the most important things in people's lives. Since Shyamalan's films are often taken to be science fiction, can we ignore this trope? I think not. I don't have an ironclad conclusion to draw, but I think this is potentially the most important theme in this series of movies and deserves to be discussed.