A great story ... buried in a grossly bad movie ...

Rating: Null/10 (24 March 2009)

OK, let's be honest here. As one sci-fi fan to another, I'd say "sure, see this movie" but would add ... "it has lots of glaring problems so be prepared." I think you can see this "like"/"dislike" perception being played out in the ratings. The IMDb ratings are (currently) above 7, yet the reaction from critics is very negative (Rotten Tomatoes rating < 25%).
My take: There is a fun story underlying this film, but the implementation (the movie itself) is pretty bad. I rate it a "6" only because I enjoyed the story idea and the special effects.
The movie is basically about an MIT professor (Nicolas Cage) who comes into possession of a 50-year old note from a time-capsule. It identifies (through numbers) all the major disasters of the last 50 years ... plus a three upcoming ones. He resolves to look deeper into the final three ... and wonders - why him, why now and what is about to happen?
On the surface, the setup is very cool-sounding; something like that will always pull me into the theater. But when you watch the movie - it's kind of a train-wreck.
The acting is bad, the way the reality-checks in the movie are nuts and even the film's color (or processing) is sub-standard (and I generally never notice that kind of stuff).
Even with one of the most watchable on-screen presences like Nicolas Cage, the performances are almost painful to watch. The events drive this movie forward, not interest in the characters.
I think the worst part of the movie is that no one did any serious "reality-checks" in the script. For instance, the time capsule hardly looked protected - it looked like the burial hatch could could be pried open with just a couple of crowbars. A couple of kids could/should have raided that thing 2 days after it was put into the ground.
Even the 'skeptical' scientific sidekick of Cage was unreal. His fellow MIT professor friend recommended that he dismiss his decoding of the numbers - even with what seemed like a 99+% positive correlation to disaster dates and death tolls. There needs to be more "gray" area to inject believable skepticism - not go up against a 99% hit rate.
Perhaps the last problem worth mentioning is timing. Everything is happening tomorrow or the day after ... literally. I'm all for tension, but the timing is just too infeasible without further and better explanation.
On the positive side, the effects are fantastic. There are crashes and explosions that are among the best I've seen. The effects crew deserves an award for the intensity and thoroughness of their work: bravo!
All in all, this is pretty interesting idea couched in a bad movie. I managed to maintain my fascination with the story in the midst of a lot of terrible movie-making. I would not recommend this to the average moviegoer, but to the sci-fi fan ... "sure, see this movie, but it has lots of glaring problems so be prepared."