‘The Signal’: Neo experience for nerd trio in derivative but mysterious sci-fi offering
Old bait-and-switch tactics, some solid acting and impressive technical craftsmanship – especially on a $3 million budget – define William Eubank’s sophomore effort. The eerie mystery-cum-sci-fi thriller “The Signal” begins promisingly too, but great assets don’t always play together well, and in this case the fantastic foreplay and moodiness just can’t carry through to the climax.
The hook has three computer nerds on a cross-country trip to take the lone female, Hayley (Olivia Cooke of “Bates Hotel”) to a California tech school. One of the guys, Nic (Brenton Thwaites, most recently in “Maleficent”) is her beau and on crutches, the result of some sort of poorly explained disease or condition. The relationship is strained, not only because of looming long distance and physical barriers but because Hayley is defecting from MIT, where Nic and Jonah (Beau Knapp) remain. The two lads are also engaged in a hacking war with an online entity known as Nomad. Nomad’s bona fide; he can hack into a security cam and send the trio a pic of their dusty station wagon as it heads through the plains, or take over one of their laptops. Finally, the two get a bead on Nomad somewhere in Nevada and they decide to take a detour. It’s also where the boldness of “The Signal” starts to fade. Continue reading
Besides being set in a harsh future where the threads of humanity claw and scrape to hang on, the two films boast multiple Toms. In “Oblivion” his Jack Harper is one of two human agents on a toxic Earth running seawater siphons to feed the rest of humanity on a housing platform in the near atmosphere (there’s more to it than that, and it’s a worthy watch) before coming shockingly face to face with another Jack Harper. In “Tomorrow,” Cruise is Major Cage, a cocksure military PR man who gets placed frontline in the battle against an invading alien species sweeping through Europe and poised to eradicate all of mankind – and he can rise from the dead. Cage can’t stomach the sight of blood and has never seen combat, but he gets demoted to private and injected into a troop of misfits as presumed fodder for the invading Mimics, which look like giant angry dust bunnies with metallic tentacles and a lion-like mug, when they take the beaches of Normandy. That presumption proves correct – initially – but after Cage gets laid to waste by an angry Alpha Mimic, he’s somehow imbued with the ability to pop back to life 24 hours before his expiration, or something like that. 
There are some clever, brilliant nuances to “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” such as the scene where Quicksilver (Evan Peters of “American Horror Story”) in a slo-mo microsecond aptly done to Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle” rearranges the trajectory of bullets and plays puckish pranks on the guards holding the guns about to take out Professor X (James McAvoy), Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) or when Wolverine travels back to 1973 and wakes up next to a lava lamp and the shrill pitch of Minnie Riperton singing “Lovin’ You” (though I believe that was a ’74 or ’75 song). And so why 1973? Well there’s an impending apocalypse in the now that stems from the actions of a pint-sized McCarthy-minded White House adviser named Trask (Peter Dinklage) who wants to wipe out all the mutants, and to do so he has weaponized a solution by leveraging the DNA of Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence). Zany history-rewriting threads involving Nixon and Kennedy ensue and there’s a neat Vietnam spin reminiscent of Zack Snyder’s “Watchmen,” and a follow-on in Paris that intrigues, but the developing action becomes a tedious waiting game pulling the whole construct down and the flashing to and fro begins to take its toll. 
Why a “name” thespian checks into such a project has to be twofold: a leading-role paycheck for cameo work and exposure – “You’ll become a household name,” you can almost hear an agent say. Think of Marlon Brando in “Superman,” a record payday for a few minutes of labor, though by that time he couldn’t much care about exposure because it invariably became fodder about his increasing corpulence. One too might think of Raymond Burr (“Perry Mason” and old “Ironside”) appearing in the 1956 American recut of the 1954 Japanese “Godzilla” (née “Gojira”). To garner a U.S. market, Burr was edited in as an American in Tokyo as the infamous dino-beast rose up from the ocean depths and merrily stomped the port of Japan.
The premise is quite simple: A man gets in his car and drives for nearly 90 minutes in crisis management mode. Hardy’s Ivan Locke is a high-performing construction foreman building the biggest modern-day skyscraper in the London area, but panicked calls from a woman in a hospital needing his reassurance keep pouring in over his BMW’s Bluetooth system. He also uses the system, a platform for his calm control over things out of his reach and the driving plot device for the film, to let his most loyal know he won’t be there at 5 a.m. when hundreds of cement trucks roll in to pour the building’s foundation. This sets off a management shit storm, but Locke, ever calm and confident, defuses each mini-tempest with reason, explanation and solution. What’s not so easy are the calls from his wife, who is confused as to why he is driving through the night and not home watching the big soccer game with the boys. 
Going back to “Stranger Than Paradise” and “
For What it's Worth 