Novel and interesting approach to determinism vs randomness and chance.

Rating: Null/10 (29 July 2009)

Nicolas Cage is Astrophysicist John Koestler, and in an early present-day scene we see him in lecture to his college class. He is posing the question, is it determinism or randomness that leads to everything in the world as we know it? Did the Earth just happen, for example, to end up at just the right distance from our Sun to support life and evolution, or was there some grand plan that resulted in it? Having lost his wife just a year earlier in a fire, his current attitude is just that $$it happens.
But in this movie the story starts 50 years earlier, when during part of the dedication of a new school all the students draw on a piece of paper "what they think the future world will look like" and each is placed in an envelope with the student's name, and all is placed in a Time Capsule in the ground in front of the school building, to be opened in 2009. So here we are!
One of the present-day students is Chandler Canterbury as John's son, Caleb Koestler. As fate (or determinism??) would have it, Caleb ends up with the envelope of young Lucinda's, and we saw in 1959 that her "picture" consisted in a long and seemingly random list of numbers with no apparent pattern.
This two-page list of numbers ends up at home and gets John's attention. Was the young girl just emotionally disturbed, or is there a message in the numbers? The movie is about John's search to unravel the mystery, and to come to terms with his own issues in life.
Good movie. I saw it twice, about 2 weeks apart, and enjoyed it both times. It contains a few scary concepts.
SPOILERS FOLLOW: Lucinda was not crazy, she was being spoken to by what might be considered angels, or maybe merely highly evolved aliens, it doesn't really matter. Her "picture of what the world will look like" was actually coded to describe terrible events which resulted in many dead. The first one John decoded was the sequence '0911012996' which represented the 2996 that were killed in the 09-11-2001 Trade Center airliner attacks. John spent a whole night checking each coded date and the number that died with 100% correspondence. One included the date of the fire his wife died in. But there were other numbers which took a bit more time to recognize as coordinates for the locations. But all this meant nothing without the big kicker, the impending giant solar flare which was to burn up the Earth and kill everyone. But right before that happened John was able to get his son and a female child to a pre-selected spot where alien ships were to remove the chosen few to a far-away planet in another galaxy so that they could be the seed to continue life.