White Noise

This movie was definitely terrifying, but only in the sense that after five minutes I felt a growing horror at the knowledge that I was going to be stuck watching this movie for another hour and 55 minutes.

Jonathan Rivers (Michael Keaton) has the perfect life--a beautiful wife who is pregnant with his child, a big luxurious house and a successfull career. He always stops to smell the flowers, and bunny rabbits and birds follow him around as he sings a merry tune. Life is good. Unfortunately, this Disney-esque montage is interrupted with the sudden death of his wife, at which point weird things start happening in the middle of the night. His cell phone rings and the caller ID indicates that it's his dead wife; the radio/tv turns on by itself and he hears/sees only static; some strange fat guy approaches him in the street and claims that Dead Wife is talking to him through the tv. I mean that's quite a lot to handle.

So, Jonathan predictably goes off the deep end and buys 20 tvs so that he can watch for signs of Dead Wife, presumably under the assumption that the afterlife consists of being trapped in a television for all eternity. He joins forces with Strange Fat Guy and a sad lonely woman, Sarah Tate (Deborah Unger), whose fiance died and also ostensibly lives in her television. They sit and watch static on the tv for hours and hours, waiting to hear messages from their dead loved ones. Eventually, Jonathan becomes so insane that he hears Dead Wife say, "GO NOW!" and interprets it to mean that he should wander around and help people. (?)

I had really high hopes that this movie would be both scary and clever, as I found the idea of hearing paranormal messages through "white noise" to be quite interesting. Unfortunately, however, the opportunity was squandered by the filmmakers, and I was forced to endure two hours of Michael Keaten helping people (unfortunately not as Batman though). Everytime his dead wife tells him to "go now," he does the opposite and stands around with his mouth open for ten minutes. Once in a while three dark figures appear in the static, but only when Jonathan is not looking so that the audience can be persuaded into feeling slight tension.

I can't even begin to describe my disappointment with White Noise. Jonathan Rivers is perhaps the most idiotic character on the planet, as nothing was more aggravating then watching him gape at Dead Wife's messages like a hilljack trying to solve a calculus equation. Furthermore, when everyone around him who uses the "white noise" communicative technique starts dying, instead of discontinuing this obviously hazardous approach he buys a few more tvs and puts them in a constant state of static. The audience is obviously not surprised then, when bad things start happening to him.

Seriously, it may seem like a good concept, and it may seem like it would be scary, but it was frightening only in its mediocrity. And calling it mediocre is pretty generous.