Watchmen (2009) ****

I first saw this film a few years ago, and honestly, I had forgotten how good it is. The film takes place in a 1980's where superheroes exist, but they haven't made much difference. They helped America win in Vietnam, but all that did was get Nixon another term. The cold war still rages, worse than ever, and the world edges closer and closer to nuclear war.

Meanwhile, the superheroes, who call themselves “Masks”, have become personae non grata. Outlawed by congress, they live quiet lives, their costumes and gadgets gathering dust. Despite following the rules and laying low, the retired Masks find themselves being hunted. Someone is working their way down a kill list of Masks, someone with access to their secret identities.

Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a vigilante who refuses to retire, sets out to find this killer. He enlists Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) and Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), but they can't seem to interest Dr.Manhattan (Billy Crudup), the blue, glowing, godlike superman who can see the future and manipulate time, space, and matter. They also can't get much of a rise out of Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), the lightning-fast super-genius, so the three set off with the resources they have, to track down a killer. In doing so, they discover a massive, worldwide conspiracy that threatens the lives of millions.

“Watchmen” is a cross between a noir film and a comic-book movie, heavy on the noir. The look is dark, filmed at night, preferably in the rain, and the outlook is very noir. The characters have dark pasts, and seem to have dark futures. Dr. Manhattan, for example, can see the past, present, and future, and can manipulate matter at will, but he is losing the ability to connect with other humans. “Watchmen” presents these characters in their full complexity. The Comedian was a heavy-drinking womanizer and misogynist, but he had a certain charm, and the original Silk Spectre, now an alcoholic herself, still carries a torch for him.

In a sense, “Watchmen” is an anti-comic-book movie. The story declares that superheroes may be able to catch a few criminals, but they have no impact on the societal forces that create rampant crime. They can rescue a few individuals here and there, but they aren't able to stop nations from sliding towards nuclear annihilation. The message is that humanity can't wait around for a superhuman savior. We have to solve our problems with the regular humans we have.

4 stars out of 5

The Signal (2014) **

There's something about seeing a movie at a film festival. Excitement is high, but expectations are moderated. There's a sense of community among the audience, and everyone is rooting for the filmmaker. This energy makes movies seem better than they really are.

“The Signal” is a case in point. The movie debuted at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, and had I seen this low-budget, sci-fi thriller there, I probably would have loved it. The plot holes, cheap gotchas based on spelling and arithmetical gimmicks, and general lack of originality would have been swept away by the thrill of seeing something so beautifully-filmed, not to mention the Question-and Answer session at the end, where the director would have charmed us all. But I didn't see it at Sundance. On HBO, the movie has to stand on its own, and it just barely limps along to a slightly annoying conclusion.

Nic (Brenton Thwaites), Jonah (Beau Knapp), and Haley (Olivia Cooke) are college friends on a road trip, moving Haley cross-country. The big move is putting a strain on Nic and Haley's romantic relationship, as is the unnamed degenerative disease that requires Nic to use crutches. On the trip, they are taunted by a computer hacker who previously hacked them and their school. Nic and Jonah use their own skills to figure out where the hacker, who calls himself Nomad, is logging in from, and they decide to take a detour to track him down and expose his identity. The trail leads to a shack out in the desert, which the guys explore in a scene straight out of “The Blair Witch Project.”

Then all hell breaks loose, and the next thing he knows, Nic is waking up in some sort of hospital facility, where all the staff are wearing hazmat suits. He meets Damon (Laurence Fishburne), apparently some kind of doctor, who reveals that Nic may have come in contact with aliens. Damon won't explain much, and he wants to run all kinds of tests on Nic. Meanwhile, Nic learns that his two friends are also in the facility, and he hatches plans to get them out. The questions of where they are, what happened to them, and whether Damon can be trusted all get answered in time, in sort-of surprising ways.

Writer/director William Eubank more or less succeeds in keeping you glued to the screen, living this disorienting experience through Nic's eyes. The pace of the film is a bit too slow, though, especially given the limited payoff at the end. Eubank could have skipped a lot of the flashbacks to Nic's running days, and really, the story would have been better served up as a 1-hour Black Mirror episode. (Although it still would have been the weakest episode in that series.) As long as the film feels (it's actually only 1h 37m), there are still major plot points that are poorly explained. Meanwhile, the explanations that are finally delivered tend to be lame and/or derivative. The acting is a strong point, both from the young stars and from Laurence Fishburne, who lends the film an air of gravitas, and they all do the best they can with the script they are given. Overall, “The Signal” doesn't look bad for a $4 million independent film, but it serves less as a fully-realized film and more as a demo tape from a promising, young writer/director who still needs to iron out some wrinkles in his craft.

2 stars out of 5