Featuring one of the most intriguing ideas of humanity, the concept of making contact with aliens, “Signal One” is a sci-fi film directed by Jonathan Sobol. It is about computer scientist, Annika Kask, and her teammates, who come in contact with aliens for the first time ever. While they don’t know if the connection is going to be beneficial for humanity or not, she and her colleagues delve into the dangers of the unknown.
Spoilers Ahead
What’s The Movie’s Plot?
The film kicks off with Annika getting interrogated in a closed room by some people. As she tries to explain how she is alive, Annika realizes how fragile human life is. She gets flashbacks of her little sister Klara, who passed away when they were still young. The movie then slowly reveals why Annika gets questioned. Sam Houston, a tech billionaire, has developed a secret project at one of his private islands in the Caribbean. He has hired Dr Perry Glassner as his lead scientist, but also wants Annika to be a part of the project, which leads to the beginning of everything.
What Is Sam Houston’s Motive?
Even though Sam does not call himself a visionary, it is quite evident he has one. Like every other tech billionaire, Sam plans to establish connections with civilizations beyond Earth for his own profit. He wants to discover alien life and earn the credit for that all by himself. I don’t think he cares about benefitting humanity; instead, he’s only concerned about his selfish requirements. As an astute businessman, Sam is able to convince Annika and Charlie Kaminsky by aligning his proposal with their interests. Dr Perry Glassner tells Annika and Charlie that Sam has set up the laboratory as a shrine for his own hubris. He doesn’t even care about the safety of the scientists whom he has hired. Sam already knew that working on the project would be risky, but he was still worried about saving it first over his scientists. He turned a blind eye to the number of casualties that happened all across the world because of his so-called project, which clearly hints at his disinterest in saving humanity.
Why Does Sam Give The Job To Annika?
Sam knows that besides Dr Glassner, Annika is another great choice who can help him accomplish his dream project. Although Annika is not interested in hunting for alien life, he persuades her to take the job. He believes that since she could capture dark matter that nobody could, she would be able to help Dr Glassner in the project. Annika explains to Sam that capturing dark matter was not easy. It is like chaos, and being a computer scientist, she is the master of algorithms which helps her find order within that chaos. Sequentially arranging the chaos is what allowed her to click the picture. This explanation impresses Sam, and he gets surer about hiring Annika. He tells her that the project is about gathering evidence to prove the existence of alien life. The offer interests her, and she takes some time to think it over, before finally accepting it and landing on the private island.
How Is Dr Glassner Searching For Life Outside Earth?
We don’t know exactly how long Dr Glassner has been working on the project. However, we are pretty sure that he was hired by Sam before Annika and Charlie. He might be a great physicist, but he is also an eccentric person. He lost his family, except his daughter Lucy, to a house fire. Had he not been drunk that night, he could have at least helped to save his family, but he was only awakened once the rescue team arrived. Since then, he has changed all the more, and he takes medications to keep himself sane. After that incident, he has developed a distant relationship with Lucy. The little kid does not have a normal life like other children of her age, and her relationship with her father does not help much. I guess that makes her feel sad, lonely and depressed. Her father, the only person besides the doctor (who takes care of Perry and her), does not spend time with her and always shoos her away. Nevertheless, these emotional hurdles do not stop Dr Glassner from building the Littlemouth, which is an FTL device (faster-than-light) that can be used to communicate with extraterrestrial beings. He uses the concept of quantum entanglement to make the machine work. The FTL machine uses a group of photons to connect to the photons that have been sent out of Earth and are light-years away. Through quantum entanglement, these photons will help capture signals from outer space that need to be decoded. Annika needs to do the decoding since she has already done it earlier. Once she decodes the pattern, they receive a signal. They are sure that the signal is from a higher intelligence located outside of Earth. However, she believes that they should only listen to those signals and NOT reply to them.
Why Does Annika Try To Stop Charlie and Dr Glassner?
Without informing Annika beforehand, Charlie initializes the Littlemouth and makes it ready to send signals from Earth to the place where they received a signal from, while Dr Glassner also gets ready. He has been waiting for this moment for a long time. When Annika gets to know about their experiment, she instantly tries to stop them. Annika knew that sending a signal back to where it came from would reveal their existence, which might put them in potential danger. She knows that it is a perilous decision Dr Glassner and Charlie are taking. They do not understand the darkness of the universe in a metaphorical way, but are only looking at it from a scientific viewpoint. She tries to inform Sam about the experiment, but as usual, he is too caught up in his world to even care. While he gets constant messages from Annika, he conveniently ignores them and has an attitude that screams that he couldn’t care less. Dr Glassner and Charlie do not listen to Annika’s warnings, and they activate the Littlemouth to send a signal from the Earth. Annika was correct when she warned them about the dangers of sending the signal because as soon as it is sent in space, the world experiences a global power outage for 8 minutes and 19 seconds. The entire world gets shrouded in panic for those 8 minutes as people die, satellites stop working, airplanes crash, and the network all over gets disrupted.
What Happens After The Door Is Opened?
Sending the signal was a big mistake because now they have opened a door for communication with the aliens unknowingly. Flies keep on dying, and the sky starts to act strangely. Lucy, who does not understand any of these things, plays outside with a kite when it gets stuck in the sky. The strings of the kite that are wrapped around her little wrist keep on tugging her as she gets dragged on the sand. Her father immediately comes to save her and cuts the strings. To their surprise, the kite flies away in the sky without any trace. They think this is the only incident that will happen, but they are wrong. Soon after this, a mysterious cloud-like structure appears in the sky, which starts getting named as the anomaly. As the cloud is growing in size, Sam gets accused by his higher-ups of doing something illegal on his private island. They warn him that other countries are taking a close look at whatever America is trying to do, and the military can attack the island at any given moment.
What Happens To Annika In The End?
While Sam plans to cover-up for the project along with Dr Glassner, Annika and Charlie, the military attacks. The entire island gets filled with armed personnel, and everybody tries to understand what that anomaly is. The military keeps them three separated so that they cannot communicate and devise another plan to cover up the entire situation. However, Charlie finds a way to talk to Annika, and urges her to interact with the mysterious anomaly. Annika has already figured that inhaling the air of the anomaly is the only way to understand it. She diverts the attention of the military and manages to execute her plan. Once she breathes in the air, the anomaly starts talking to her on a molecular level. It takes the shape of Klara and tells Annika it is no longer biological or a machine; instead, it is like Physics itself. Now that humanity has revealed its existence through the signal sent from the Littlemouth, the anomaly is trying to protect us.
The ending of the film does not sit well with me because it makes no sense for an alien life to protect humanity. If anything, aliens should either destroy us or make profitable connections with humanity. In reality, our Earth is still visible in the solar system and can be captured from light years away. However, at the end of the film, we see Earth getting cloaked by the anomaly which is absolute nonsense. In conclusion, I can say that the build up of the movie is really good and intriguing, but the makers could not end it in a fulfilling manner.
