Here is another low budget movie that seems ultimately to have been made to ornament one or two fairly lavish setpieces. see for example skinwalker ranch and the banshee chapter which without one or two meretricious moments would not amount to much at all. and of course it is always hard to criticise low budget pictures which are also genre pictures. so in fairness we have a very skillfully shot film, nicely edited ( owing i felt a large debt to 'Primer' stylistically). and there is laurence fishburne who is good but he is only now and forever more morphius in the matrix for all eternity, more or less. unfortunately, the script is a mere cypher, merely to take you from the promising beginning, through the lacklustre and plot less main hour or so until you arrive at the climax where the largest part of the budget is spent. goodnight and thankyou. but think about this for one moment after and you will find a film which collapses under scrutiny. which is not the worst thing, after all some of the most entertaining movies i have see are ridiculous when analysed.. but apart from the million dollar effects shot this is a film that struggles to tell any kind of cogent narrative at all. it is similar in tone to chronicle, a superior film in it's depiction of humans becoming 'more than human'.. and it has very strong echoes to donnie darko. so kudos for the effort. next time try and develop character and plot a little more and you will come up with something quite good i am sure. as it is a sunny day i gives it 6 : )
Review of The Signal
