Interesting but doubtful twist on The Apocalypse

Rating: 7/10 (22 June 2009)

John Koestler (Cage) is an MIT astrophysics prof with a very precocious preteen son Caleb. At Caleb's elementary school, a 50 year-old time capsule from 1959 is opened. Other kids get drawings of what kids from then thought 2009 would be like, but Caleb gets a sheet full of row after row of numbers, apparently meaningless, written by a girl called Lucinda.
It takes a little while for John to figure it out, but the numbers refer to dates and number of fatalities for every major disaster for the past 50 years - in perfect chronological order. Later, immediately before witnessing the crash of an airliner - predicted on the sheet - he discovers that the GPS coordinates (latitude/longitude) of the disaster are also included in the hitherto mysterious "joining" numbers between disasters.
So far so good and quite engrossing. But what begins as an interesting mystery rapidly evolves into an end-of-the-world scenario with hardly any lead-in at all (compare the months the world had to prepare in Deep Impact). This in itself might be OK especially as superhuman/alien influences are involved, but read on..
Global disaster looms in the form of an impending solar super flare. Solar flares regularly engulf the Earth, but the effects have to do with communications disruptions, possible destruction of electronic devices and spectacular displays of northern or southern lights. This one is different and Koestler describes it as a super flare, "a 100 µTesla wave of radiation that would destroy our ozone layer". But that's something which would have resulted in a slow, lingering death for much but not necessarily all of planet Earth rather than an apocalyptic one where the Earth's surface is swallowed in fire and humanity perishes, as in the film. There's doubt too about that "100 µTesla" - when Googled, that intensity doesn't seem particularly lethal. The impression is given that the Sun's fatal outburst is a natural phenomenon and not something that the aliens have induced..
Curiously, while the authorities know about and start to give warnings of the event in the day or so beforehand, they clearly have little prior knowledge despite the fact that the sun is under constant study by various learned bodies involving Earth-based observations and dedicated satellites. Please SF makers, work within what is and don't insult viewer intelligence.
The idea of Whisperers/Watchers is OK - outside of normal human experience so it's possible. They have been monitoring events for at least the past 50 years and drove Lucinda to create the sheet, then made sure Caleb received it. He and Abby (Lucinda's grand daughter), among other children throughout the world, are Chosen. But why only kids (and bunnies) get saved is a bit of a puzzle tho, surely some mature humans should be included.
Mainstream end-of-the-world movies where the End actually eventuates and is depicted in graphic detail are understandably not too generally popular - the only other one I can think of is When Worlds Collide though there are probably others. I am inclined to think that the "sudden" ending caters to the "24"/attention-of-a-goldfish mindset where the audience majority are assumed to be idiots who will quickly lose interest if something dramatic (however improbable) does not happen, and happen SOON. After all these blockbusters do cost heaps to make and as always, money rules (sadly)...
SF geeks like me will find this movie irresistible but it's too bad the proposed means for the destruction of the Earth does not make sense. Otherwise it could have been a great, rather than a merely good, Sci-Fi flick. 7/10