You'll hate me for this, but Signs is actually one of my favorite movies. I have to say, the weird ending is the whole point of the damn thing. Most of what happens in that movie points to that conclusion. It's not a movie about an alien invasion--it's a movie about that weird gray area between coincidence and fate, which is why there's the whole religious subtext to the film. It's a movie about faith, and I find it really touching, which is pretty crazy, seeing as how I'm an agnostic (or on really bad days, a full blown atheist).
(BTW, it's in bad taste to post spoilers about the ending of a movie without warning folks.)
The title of the film isn't a reference to the crop circles, it isn't meant to define them as being "warning signs". The title refers to all those little coincidences that add up to the conclusion, where you wonder if its all coincidence, or if its fated to occur that way, and thats where all the faith and religion crap comes in. Those little coincidences are SIGNS of there maybe being something more to the world...fate or god or whatever...
If you want an alien invasion movie, stick to ID4 or War of the Worlds or any of the other billion movies out there. If it floats your boat, cut the end off Boon's recut of WOTW and slap it onto Signs. It just seems kinda dumb to want to make all these movies end the same way:
Aliens invade, people die, nukes fly, earth reduced to a cinder, people/aliens win and are left to rebuild.
As an afterthought, regarding your suggestions for WOTW--
When Boon was working on the WOTW recut, I volunteered to help him a bit some of the stuff he was writing for the film (mainly the opening and ending sequences), but unfortunately, due to time conflicts and "creative differences" between he and I, my involvement was dropped.
I think he did a good job, but the main thing that bothered me was the use of the two subtitles at the end of the movie, denoting shifts in time (one of them I think was "20 Years Later"). It didn't fit with the film, as the film never uses that sort of subtitling, and then in the last two minutes of the film, he uses them twice, when in reality, they weren't at all necessary. Firstly, because the audience is smart enough to kinda figure things out for themselves, and secondly, the shot of that little blossom or whatever it was that was opening up doesn't need to be taking place now, or "20 years later", or even "100 years later". It's a simple of rebirth, hope, yadayada.
And that was a major lesson to me, when it comes to writing and film editing and all of that--really stupid little stuff can pull you out of the moment completely. The editing at the end was really nice, really put together good, but making the assumption that the audience wasn't smart enough to figure out the ending, and so using the subtitles, just made the whole damn thing scream "FAN EDIT!". Give the viewer the minimum amount of material necessary for them to figure out what's going on...which is why the re-editing of those shots to make the earth look ruined and whatnot aren't really necessary...Boon shows the earth getting nuked, and then we cut to that blossom opening up, and that's the damn point. We get our asses kicked, but we can get back up and rebuild. The point is made, and the viewer gets it.
But those little subtitles just get me...
