A very cool movie... until the last 5 minutes

Rating: 6/10 (30 July 2009)

I took my girlfriend to see this and we really enjoyed the film overall. The plot a child with a gift of seeing patterns or possibly precognition or possibly divine intervention was interesting. The complexity of the clue was wonderful, the characters were well written and well acted, the spookiness (if that's a word at all) grew at a good pace throughout the film, the weaving of the events into a whole cloth was great, but then it came crashing down in the last 5 minutes. I don't know what went through Pearson's head as he penned the last chapter but I suspect the song "Come Sail Away" by the Styx was playing on a continuous loop. Here's the spoiler folks, the angelic beings we see throughout the film trying to make contact with the child lead are aliens. Not only are they aliens they are pretty weak aliens. They sent the knowledge of Earth's impending disaster to us 50 years ago through a child. While they had the ability to foresee major disasters on a stellar and local scale, and they had the ability to translate the information into our calendar and GPS systems, they did not seem to know it would have been better to broadcast a signal instead and possibly mention the whole "world will die in 2009" thing so that we might be motivated to do something about it. Instead they play mysterious and using their psychic powers contact some kids, make people think they are nuts and eventually spirit away a few human children and put them in a zoo. OK, maybe it's not a zoo but if it isn't, then you have a few human children dropped on an alien world with little or no survival skills and no elders to teach them anything (Thanks soooo much Mr alien, now we can all die from a thousand different problems or go feral). I was going to give the film a 8 or 9 until that part. I have hopes that a DVD release will include an alternate, non-twilight zone ending that makes sense but I'm not holding my breath...