Signal Degradation

More than a year ago, I stumbled on a list somewhere that was something to the effect of "fun science fiction movies you've never heard of." It's from this list that I learned about the fascinating-though-not-ultimately-good Coherence,  and the far more entertaining Time Lapse. I threw everything from that list into some streaming queue or another, and every now and then I fire one up. Most recently, it was a movie called The Signal.

Three college friends are on a road trip to confront a hacker whose location they've traced. But when they reach the source, they don't find a dangerous computer genius. They experience (no need to be coy about this part) alien abduction! Next thing they know, they wake up separated from one another and in government custody. Secretive agents want to know exactly what happened to them, and it turns out to be more than even they realize.

This movie starts out well enough. The writing is rather sophisticated early on, not spoon-feeding the exposition to you and forcing you to connect the dots about who these people are and what their relationship is to each other. The movie draws you in as it makes you work to understand it.

You then have to work even harder when the weirdness begins. The deeper into the story you get, the more unexplainable details are laced into the narrative. Whether you're the sort of person who tries to "figure out the end of a movie" or not, this movie will start you doing that. You're constantly having to reevaluate your assumptions about what's really going on here, as each new piece of information given seems to contradict whatever theory you've crafted so far.

Unfortunately, the longer it goes, the less the movie comes across as actually clever, and the more it's like it's trying to seem clever. The puzzle box of this movie has more levers and gizmos than feel strictly necessary. Extraneous bits seem grafted on in an effort just to obscure the truth. Though I don't want to spoil the ending, I think it's not giving too much away to say that everything resolves like a subpar episode of The Twilight Zone -- but without the allegorical commentary. It's an M. Night Shyamalan twist "because there's supposed to be a twist," and not necessarily because it adds to the experience.

Still, the cast is interesting enough at times to save this from being a total bummer. Brenton Thwaites stars. You may recognize him from the most recent Pirates of the Caribbean movie, among other places, but he gives reasonably good "what the hell is going on?" -- enough to keep a current of empathy underpinning most of the strangeness. Olivia Cooke is here too, though her role is far less significant than in the recent Ready Player One (and you could argue she's a marginal character there).

The real draw to try to bring in an audience is Laurence Fishburne, cast here as one of the shadowy government types questioning the hero. He's totally here to play Morpheus, minus the kung fu. He speaks in the same slow and soothing way, and I honestly can't say if it helps or hurts the movie. It's fun as hell at times. At other times, it also feels like self-parody you're supposed to laugh at. But I guess it does keep you engaged in one way or another.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend The Signal. I think at best, I'd give it a C-. Which I guess means that list I found is batting .3333 right now. Not bad for baseball. Not great for movies. Perhaps I should cull the others out of the queue.