The Signal
starring Brenton Thwaites, Olivia Cooke, Beau Knapp, Lin Shaye, Robert Longstreet and Laurence Fishburne
written by William Eubank, Carlyle Eubank and David Frigerio
directed by William Eubank
Rating: ♦♦♦◊◊
At first I thought The Signal was going to be an aggressive viral disease outbreak movie, like The Andromeda Strain (1971, re-made in 2008), or Outbreak (1995). It wasn’t. It’s an alien movie. A group of MIT college kids traveling across country is sidetracked into pursuing a computer hacker calling himself “Nomad,” who has been harassing them. They are able to triangulate and pursue Nomad’s computer signal. What they discover is a creepy old empty house in the desert. Of course, it’s an alien rendezvous point and the kids end up being abducted. But it doesn’t seem so at first. At first it seems like a legitimate government lab where they are being treated in isolation after a close encounter with an “EBE,” and Extraterrestrial Biological Entity. It looks like a movie about government conspiracy to conceal knowledge of the existence of extraterrestrials - some kind of X Files thing. But no.
It was interesting. Not as interesting as I hoped. A viral disease outbreak movie would have been better, especially since it would have coincided nicely with the Ebola outbreak still going on in west Africa. But, of course, Ebola movies have already been done.