You might have heard that Edgar Wright removed himself from the director’s chair of Ant-Man. And that the search for a new director that could jump in and immediately start filming the new addition to the Marvel Universe spun around like a roulette wheel. First the ball bounced to the director of Anchorman! No! The director of We’re the Millers? Everyone keep your hands off the table! The final drop is … the director of Yes Man? Yes. That sounds right.
By the time The Signal ends it’s apparent that it’s director, William Eubank, desperately wants to be at that roulette table.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In Hollywood, this universe building is the tail that wags the dog. But when your sophomore movie ends up feeling like a resume submission (err signal) to movie execs to show that you have bullet-point experience in building worlds, the mechanics of superhuman strength and working with an established movie veteran (Laurence Fishburne)? That’s not a good thing.
It’s actually unfortunate.
The first half of The Signal is a deft genre exercise. There are actual moments of stark unease, where the viewer has no idea what sort of terrifying fate is in store for our techy duo of college students Nic (Brenton Thwaites) and Jonah (Beau Knapp). These MIT pals have used their cross country road trip – of moving Nic’s soon to be ex-girlfriend, Haley (Olivia Cooke) – as an excuse to locate an IP address sent to them from a hacker who’s been trolling their hacking abilities from the middle of nowhere Nevada. These days, nothing gets your goat like someone hiding behind a computer screen.
On a more personal and real level, Nic had an unseen accident that’s relegated him to crutches. And we see many flashbacks of him running freely through the woods. Eubank is able to get a little more mileage out of this motif than he should, but a lot of that credit is due to Cooke and Thwaites. Together they elevate the flashbacks from an easy he misses the freedom he used to feel from running to an emotionally crippling fear of distance and reliance in their impending long-distance relationship.
Anyway, Haley gets sucked up into the sky. And Nic wakes up in a sterile hospital in a room where he hears Jonah speak to him through the vents. His reflexes and muscle responses are tested by a man in a Hazmat suit (Fishburne).
There is certainly an intriguing, horrific set-up in The Signal. And a very game Fishburne (who speaks in a deliberate, humming tone and left all his blinks in his trailer; masterfully and deliberately keeping us unaware of his intentions, but still coming across as benevolent). And while movies aren’t in any way indebted to become what the reviewer wants from a film, where The Signal goes here forward is probably the least interesting place that Eubank could’ve taken us from where he started us.
Actually, without giving too much away, it just doesn’t make any sense. There are tests that are administered, above ground locations created and shootout scenarios fulfilled that have no reason to be there by the film’s closing. Other than that they’ll be a great calling card for future, bigger films.
And these are the types of films — low budget horror, low budget sci-fi — from whence the keys to the tentpole universe are handed out. Look at Godzilla. Gareth Edwards’ previous film, Monsters, was a spooky oddball genre film made for $500,000. Look at the upcoming Fantastic Four. Josh Trank made the found-footage superpower-responsibility fable Chronicle before. Both Edwards and Trank are also slated to direct the first two Star Wars character spinoffs.
Budget-wise, The Signal falls between those two examples at $4 million. But Edwards and Trank were rewarded for making films that completed their original genre premises. The Signal is composed of two halves of different films. And by the end, it feels like Eubank doesn’t want to be caught lying on his resume.
Brian Formo is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel. You can follow him on Twitter at @BrianEmilFormo.
