"Knowing" when to avoid a movie

Rating: 1/10 (3 April 2009)

** SPOILERS ** The earth will end. Some weird aliens want to take away a few children and rabbits to repopulate a planet with strange white trees and lots of pollen. Let's hope they brought their asthma-puffers.
And that's it. What does this have to do with the strange sequence of numbers, a plane-crash, and a New York subway train derailment that you have seen in the trailers? Well, actually, nothing at all. There is no connection whatsoever between the prophecies of disasters and the alien abduction plot that is revealed at the end of the film.
Who came up with this plot? And moreover, was there really not one person among the hundred or so individuals who worked on this movie who was able to stop think for a moment and say, "hang on, the first 1 hour and 45 mins of this film have no real bearing whatsoever on the overall premise"? Because, let's face it, those aliens directly intervene and take the kids to their spaceship, by abducting them at a petrol station. This really didn't require the parents of either child to believe in, or even care in the slightest way about, the so-called prophecies. And it didn't require the audience to sit through all of those drawn out scenes, either.
In fact, the only practical purpose of these prophecies seems to have been to satisfy a sadistic streak in the aliens, to drive a child in the 60s mad by whispering to her until she takes her own life!
Aside from the incompetent storytelling (the whole "aliens will save a few humans just before the world ends" storyline has been done over and over), this also film excels at over-acting (Cage), over-screaming (Byrne), and over-CGI-ing (while the effects were generally quite good, was it really necessary to show a tortured burning CGI moose running through a forest?).
Please, directors and script writers, don't torture the audience with nonsensical drivel!