Mixed Signals
Too many plot holes and other issues plague this recent indie film.
Like everyone, I have my go-to websites when searching for information about movies, like IMDB for cast lists and Wikipedia for meatier details of whatever movie I watched last. After finishing The Signal (the 2014 sci-fi movie, not the 2007 horror vehicle) I looked up its Wikipedia entry, where I found this nugget: “At Sundance, the filmmakers and actor Brenton Thwaites described the film as a Twilight Zone–style story drawing heavily on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave intended as a modern interpretation of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.”
It’s a brilliant aspiration, and would be lovely if it were true. I wonder, however, if Thwaites acted in the same movie I watched. For the life of me, I can’t see how The Signal is a modern interpretation of The Wizard of Oz. Tin Man was a modern interpretation of The Wizard of Oz, in the sense that that miniseries was a fairly obvious steampunk retelling of the classic tale. The Signal, however, is more mess that interpretation. Sure it’s pretty, but its slow pace and many plot holes left me shrugging my shoulders.
Thanks to its overuse of closeups, I now know every curve and contour on Brenton Thwaites’s face.
On the surface, the plot is simple: Nic (Thwaites) and Jonah (Beau Knapp) are driving cross-country to drop Nic’s girlfriend Haley (Olivia Cooke) off at college. They stop in Nevada to confront a hacker called NOMAD, who messed with Nic and Jonah’s computers while they were at college. (This is never satisfactorily explained.) While in Nevada, the friends are attacked by some unknown entity, and Nic wakes up in a stark room. Haley is in a coma, Jonah has disappeared, and Nic is being interrogated by Damon (Laurence Fishburne). Nic spends the rest of the movie trying to outwit Damon and save his friends.
Several issues kept me from fully enjoying The Signal. While I have come to accept the orange/teal color combination that has become a hallmark of lazy post-production visual editing, The Signal sinks to new depths in terms of uninspired visual cues. In addition to the aforementioned orange/teal color combo, desert scenes are faded, night shots are so pitch black I can’t see what’s happening on-screen, flashbacks are hyper-saturated, and interior shots are bright and washed out. All together, the visual editing is pretty to look at, but very generic, undistinguishable from your average sci-fi film.
The film’s problems don’t end with the editing, either: the plot is confusing and incomprehensible. I’ll spare you any spoilers, but I felt that the films’s major reveals were poorly handled or not explained in a satisfying way. The ending also seems to contradict everything that’s been set up in the preceding 90 minutes, making it seem as if the characters were all running and chasing each other for nothing. I get how the writers intended the film to be a modern version of Plato’s Cave (way more than I can believe it’s supposed to resemble The Wizard of Oz), but only after the idea has been presented. Nothing about The Signal screamed Plato’s Cave while I was watching it, and when movie plots are this incoherent, I’m not going to go searching too hard for their metaphorical meanings.
Independent films that aren’t part of a franchise cannon can afford to take chances; however, independent movies can (and do) dream big and fail big, as The Signal has done. I wasn’t so much angry at having watched a bad movie as I was sad at its wasted potential. The Signal did feature decent acting from several up-and-coming actors who will hopefully go on to do great things. Maybe they’ll all get a chance to shine in a movie that doesn’t break under the weight of its own metaphors.
tl;drs
Blank is a blanker version of blank: The Signal is a more stylish, incoherent, X-Files episode.
Screen credits over/under: Over: three people have writing credits on The Signal, which is enough to push it into incomprehensible territory.
Recommended if you like: Extreme closeups, Laurence Fishburne acting through a hazmat suit.
Better than I expected: I like Creepy Laurence Fishburne better than Good Guy Laurence Fishburne, and he does well here.
Worse than I hoped: Whether I missed it, or the modern/crappy sound editing obscured it, I didn’t catch any kind of signal. In a movie called This Signal, this seems like an important overlooked detail.
The Signal would work better as a(n): novel. The convoluted plot might be explained better through internal narration.
Verdict: Low-budget indie sci-fi thrillers can often be a delight, but this isn’t one of them.
