Signs

The score is overly loud compared to the rest of the sound mix. Annoyingly loud, like how commercials are four times louder than the show you are watching, to jolt your attention.

Shammy is also always very good at the audio placements and noises. The weird ass clicks and throaty noises the aliens make seem realistic enough. You can tell it is language, and that it is conversational, when you hear them talking over the baby monitor.

The baby monitor is a good technical addition for the time period, because the technical side of it is probably correct. Those things will pick up shit.

I remember being a teenager messing about with a high powered CB radio, and my dad could hear my outgoing transmissions through certain phones in the house. Which is why I always found this believable, and from a technical standpoint it actually does work this way.

The flashbacks Gibson's character has to his wife dying on the road, telling him a bunch of crazy death's door shit, got resolved pretty solid too. It worked.

The daughter did a great job as well. I remember her from Little Miss Sunshine. Talented.

One of the things I really enjoyed is that they never fully show you the alien face. It is always in reflections, and it looks close enough to what all movie aliens look like while also looking really ape-like in a way.

That, and having them be vulnerable to water. I cannot figure out what kind of elemental life they would be made of to be vulnerable to water. Some sort of soluble thing, sure, but what kind.

Here is where I landed on it while watching. Maybe they are sodium based. A bulk piece can survive a humid environment for small time frames, which would explain why they only ever came to Earth in short bursts. And when Merrill started swinging away with the glasses of water, it looked like it immediately third-degree burned the skin and smoked.

The chemistry actually goes along with that. Bulk sodium in humid air does not ignite, it skins over, a crust forms and slows the reaction down, which is why lab sodium can sit out in air briefly. Liquid water is the opposite. It goes exothermic fast and releases hydrogen, which accounts for both the burn pattern and the smoke. So the model is a body with a hardened outer layer that tolerates ambient moisture for a while and fails catastrophically the second liquid water gets through it.

And that answers the thing this movie gets mocked for the most, which is why they would land on a planet that is most of the way covered in the stuff that kills them. If they cannot stay long, this was never an invasion. It is raiding. Get in, take, and leave before the crust fails.