Official Trailer
Rating: 6.3/10 | Genre: Mystery, Science Fiction | Runtime: 112 min
Starring: Isabelle Fuhrman, Josh Hutcherson, David Thewlis, Dennis Quaid, Vanessa Smythe
Signal One wants to be a smart sci-fi thriller, but it mostly just spins its wheels for two hours before running out of ideas.
The setup is genuinely interesting. Isabelle Fuhrman plays Dr. Sarah Chen, a computer scientist who gets recruited by a tech billionaire (Josh Hutcherson, playing it surprisingly sinister) to investigate some kind of extraterrestrial material they’ve found. They’re working out of a private facility on a Caribbean island, which immediately sets off alarm bells. You know this isn’t going to end well.
The first half actually works. There’s real tension as the team starts analyzing whatever this thing is. David Thewlis shows up as an older scientist who clearly knows more than he’s saying. Dennis Quaid is there too, though honestly he doesn’t have much to do. The mystery of what they’ve actually found kept me engaged. Is it alive? Is it dangerous? What do these billionaires really want?
But then they make contact with whatever is out there, and the movie just falls apart. The screenplay doesn’t seem to know what it wants to say about first contact or what it means. It just throws chaos at the screen and hopes you’ll find it exciting. There’s a scene in the second act where everything goes wrong at once, and I couldn’t even tell what was happening or why I should care.
Fuhrman does fine with what she’s given, but she’s mostly reacting to things rather than driving the story. Hutcherson’s character becomes a cartoon villain. The whole thing feels like a script that went through too many rewrites and nobody remembers what the original idea was.
The pacing is the real killer here. At 112 minutes, there’s probably 30 minutes of padding. Long scenes of people walking through hallways. Conversations that don’t go anywhere. One particular sequence involving the facility’s computer system just drags on forever without revealing anything we care about.
I wanted to like this. The premise had legs. But Signal One gets so caught up in being mysterious that it forgets to be interesting. By the time the ending rolls around, you’re just ready for it to be over. Have you seen this one yet, or are you thinking about checking it out?
Where to Watch
Rent on: Amazon Video