Signs + National Treasure = Lame.

Rating: 3/10 (7 October 2009)

Coming from the director of such cult classics as "The Crow" and "Dark City" one would expect this too would be something that will endure the test of time and embed itself into the public conscious. Unfortunately, this movie only repeats tired clichés with mish-mashed concepts and will likely go the way of 'Signs' and the remake of "The Day The Earth Stood Still."
Aliens have always been a popular trend in movies, but in the last decade American cinema goers have not seen many that actually relied on story and characters over typical Hollywood flash. Honestly, I wish for once a person would spend as much on the writing as they do on over blown CGI effects. At least when pie plates on strings and rubber suits were the norm we were blessed with a decent story.
This is a movie that tries so hard to be unique and thought-provoking that it comes off as preachy and irritating. At first it starts out okay, there's the Wednesday Adams-looking little girl hearing voices, so you already know it's going to have something to do with the supernatural. Fast-forward to present day, with Nick Cage and his son who by some stroke of luck (or misfortune) gets the cryptic number prophecy sheet. Cage, in a drunken stupor, figures the sheet out for what it really is, and starts tying its numbers to 9/11 and a bunch of other disasters. How very Nostradamus....
There are some events that have yet to happen, and Cage, for some reason, believes he can actually prevent them... So he tries to be at ground zero of as many of the disasters he can. One of these involves Cage witnessing a plane crash tearing through a congested highway, and then running to the site of the carnage and yelling "Hey!--HEY!" at people walking around covered in flames. The other humorous moment is when he tries to stop what he assumes is going to be a terrorist attack in New York. He calls the FBI and rambles in detail about how there's going to be an attack and that if they don't do what he says, people are going to die... making -himself- sound like a terrorist.
Eventually we get to see Lucinda's old house with all her newspaper clippings of various disasters and her number codes scrawled on the walls, oh and there's this weird picture depicting a passage from The Bible about aliens??? Great, it isn't demons or some cult who're after Nick's son, but aliens... Angel Aliens who look like some crap out of 'Mission To Mars' and predict disasters (like a super solar flare about to kill everything on Earth) but won't do squat to stop them. Guess it's punishment for all the wars and ravaging of the planet, or maybe they're just voyeuristic death fanatics.
So the aliens take the kids anyway, poor Nick is stuck on Earth for it's inevitable destruction all because he couldn't "hear the call" (rapture?), and the worthy children get to go to a fresh new planet which I'm guessing is supposed to be Eden since there's the big "Tree of Knowledge" that God / The Aliens don't want anyone eating from or "they shall surely die." I hope they checked the place for talking snakes. This movie wouldn't have been so laughable if they'd got somebody else besides Cage and if it hadn't tried to mix Religion with Sci-Fi.