I just finished watching this German produced Netflix film and it was completely awful. If you are looking forward to this film, go watch it first if you want and skip my little review below.
spoiler
If you don’t care and want to just take my word for it … it is a waste of four one hour episodes, a total of four hours of content.
Everything inside the film and its marketing is an AI like production with all the sci-fi alien contact cliches and movie tropes from the past 20 years. A mysterious woman in space having an epiphany, hearing voices; a father with his daughter, a daughter with a disability, a father with a truckers hat, construction worker garb running in a cornfield, mysterious no-name SWAT team/soldiers, a nuclear explosion, helicopters, jet fighters, astronauts, the ISS, scientists, the desert, cityscapes, car crashes, car chase, secret agents, a plane crash, … input all this into an AI program and ask it for a script and you’ll end up with ‘The Signal’
There is so little soul, sense or common logic in the film that to me it has all the hallmarks of a script and writing that was all generated by AI tools. If you look at the writers who put this together it is a group of four young writers with almost no prior experience in major film, yet they were handed the keys to a multi-million dollar production.
I like watching new films and I regularly take my chances at watching something new and different. This one was interesting but the more I watched it, the more I became suspicious that it was either written by a terrible dyslectic writer with little life experience … or it was mashed together with an AI text generator.
One of the biggest giveaways that it most likely was an AI generated script was the corny voice over wrap up at the end of the film. I felt like I had just watched a four hour version of those Youtube auto generated AI fake film previews that are popular right now.
An AI movie would likely be an improvement over the dog shit Amazon and Netflix put out. The streaming services make content chasing algorithms. Sometimes they get lucky and find a legitimately good indie film they can slap their “Netflix Original” branding on. Rest assured they actually had nothing to do with its production and just bought it after the fact. The stuff they produce from scratch is usually the worst.