Black Noise

So about ten + years ago various employees of the U. S. Embassy in Cuba were afflicted or attacked by some sonic waves or microwaves. A couple of them died. An investigation concluded that the government of Cuba had been directing a new energy weapon at the embassy.

This movie takes off on that historical footnote and has a team of black ops go to an island to rescue a family that is being attacked by the sonic beams. They find only the wife, and she soon dies, with lots of blood dripping out of her ears.

The rest of the movie is sonic sound effects and what looks like infrared lighting, followed by various members of the rescue team grimacing, moaning, groaning, and having hallucinations.

There is about zero action in this action movie. If you do not want to watch five people looking constipated, groaning, and slapping their heads in pain, then skip this turkey.

Seriously, did the director and cast and all the rest ever watched the movie end to end and said yeah let's release it. It's totally nonsense, beginning to end. The acting, omg I definitely need to try it, bet I cannot do worse than any of the cast.

Do yourself a favor and avoid like plague. I had to sit through it till the end for you, doing God's work. Again, I beg you to not waste time and just 1* this **** so hopefully they learn to do better (I doubt smh)

Can't believe they release this nonsense, who gives money for this **** to be produced, just... I cannot understand, nothing makes sense!!

Rescue mission, sonic mind control, the end. As with all Hollywood action films, same formula since the 1960's. Keep hoping they come up with something NEW. Instead: Rescue, and instead of doing something smart go after the 'why', revenge, everybody dies except the 'hero'. BORING!!!!! In this case Voice on the phone, off grid mission, and absolutely no imagination. The call wants to verify the person, however the person doesn't verify the voice. It's AI from the jump. Then once they get to the mission and the target is dead, they sit around FOR HOURS before they decide they need to get off the island. However, instead of getting off the island, after sitting around for hours, they decide to neutralise the threat. Who cares, get off the island, then figure it out. Stupid, boring, predictable. It only gets 2 for the scenery. If stupid ,boring and predictable is your thing then this is for you.

Some sort of five person special forces-like unit is dispatched by a seemingly random voice on the phone to an exclusive off-the-grid luxury island to rescue some seemingly random client. We learn nothing about the voice on the phone, the client, or what these five people are doing together. The team arrives to find a deserted island and immediately is subjected to some kind of mind altering sonic blast. From that point on they hallucinate or vividly recall bad dreams.

There are enough positives here that the movie deserves more than one star reviews. The women are attractive, the cast can act to a reasonable B-movie standard, there is little bad CGI, and the director doesn't waste our time trying to make something of a plot that becomes obvious to anyone who has seen the movie Predator. There is an escape from the island subplot that is an appealing one though is never fully developed.

The primary negatives here are the derivative plot and lack of character development. Aside from their physical characteristics I could not tell you one thing about any of the five leads: not their names, skill sets, likes, dislikes, nothing. The only thing we learn about them is they are unprofessional: there is a lot of yelling and crying with virtually no actual communication taking place. The majority of the dialog is exposition about what we are looking at: "we need to get off the island", "I heard a sound", and so on.

The other big negative is the plot is revealed in the first minute on the island when we see the Predator-like display with the alien glyphs. From then on you know what is going to happen, just not how. Without any spoilers suffice it to say the ending will not blow you away.

Five stars for the positives. It is by no means a great movie but it is watchable and even enjoyable at times. I did watch it to the end so there is entertainment value here. Five stars.

I will try to be spoiler free, but the TL;DR opinion is it's terrible. Lots of great ideas on an individual basis, but all mashed together into an incomprehensible mess.

The trailer looked downright interesting. A mercenary team hired to pull an extraction from an island reserved for the rich and shameless.

So far, so good, a bit of a mystery backstory why a late addition to the team shows up, but no worries, adds to the intrigue.

Once they get to the island, everything starts falling apart. They are assaulted by some kind of white noise generator that causes them to bleed out of their ears and behave erratically.

There is hints in the film this might be the work of a hostile gov't or possibly ETs. All kinds of hooks and ideas. Again, so far, so good. Acting is acceptable, lighting is good to "interesting" (a fair overuse of gel filters and saturation cranked up to 11...but it's possible it was on purpose to simulate mental breakdown) but the CGI where used (sparingly, thankfully) was truly wretched.

Unfortunately the build-up of the mystery is thrown away in a rush to reach the end where the director and/or writer ran out of ideas and money in a truly dreadful and nonsensical way.

Quite the shame really, a lot of the ideas, taken separately held promise, but somewhere along the line (about 40 minutes into the film) the whole thing fell totally apart.

Skip it, it's dreadful. 3/10 at best.