Movie Details
| Title: | The Signal | |
| Director: | David Bruckner, Dan Bush, Jacob Gentry | |
| Year: | 2007 | |
| Genre: | Apocalypse | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 03.11.07 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 03.11.07 | Alamo South Lamar | This Screening is part of event: South by Southwest 2007 The midnight show was the hotly anticipated The Signal. Everyone who saw it at Sundance raved. For good reason too. This movie is great. Basically, the televisions, phones, and radios all stop working, broadcasting this jumbled noise that if you watch or listen to it makes you go crazy and kill people. Sounds a lot like Stephen King's Cell, huh. The movie's split into three sections (each given different directing credit) which sort of represent different stories but really they all interlap so it's more like different chapters told from different characters' POV. So it's really unfortunate that Cell's gonna be a movie because I bet history regards this film as the Cell knock-off (even though they had finished shooting before the book came out), especially sad since I feel this movie develops better than Cell does. This is the first movie in a very long time belonging to a very short list where I felt the whole going-insane thing was really effective. I think it's one of the hardest things to convey in film and really only a handfull of films do it really well and this is one of them. That's major in my book. So... the only very minor problems I have with this movie are in the third story. The second story is a lot more dark comedy, which I think would work perfectly if the third story was as different to the previous as the second had been to the first, but instead the third story returns to the tone of the first which makes the second stand out all the more. I think it would've been a GREAT move to make the third segment really disjointed and abstract, closer to an art film than a zombie or horror. THat way, the progression of style throughout the movie would symbolize or mirror how you might react to the end of the world: first terror, then an ironic sense of humor, then finally insanity. I think in some subtle ways that can be read into it now but they had a chance to make it more overt. That's it though. I really liked this movie. A lot more should be written about it... but my bed calls me with sweet soothing sighs. |
