Dear God, it's like the 70's all over again.

Rating: 1/10 (2 September 2009)

There is a depressingly regular cycle that the American film industry goes through which every now and then throws up a bunch of movies about how the world is going to be destroyed.
What promises to be an initially interesting premise turns stupid towards the end, ruining what might have been rather a good film.
Nicholas Cage is a university astrophysics lecturer who's wife was killed in a hotel fire a year previously leaving him with a semi-deaf son and a fairly severe drinking problem. The opening of a time capsule at his son's school unearths a sheet of paper filled with apparently random numbers. It quickly becomes apparent that the numbers reveal the dates and numbers of dead in every major disaster since the paper was put in the time capsule in 1959. There are only three sets of numbers left unaccounted for and these appear to predict disasters on the next three following days.
It is in the nature of the film that it is almost impossible to discuss it without writing a spoiler. For those not interested in reading a spoiler I would say this film is average. It has some decent acting and a couple of fantastic set pieces but is let down by a weak ending. It is moderately enjoyable but I probably wouldn't bother unless you are a big Nic Cage fan.
Spoiltastic
Things I liked about this movie:
1. When Nic Cage takes the numbers round to his mate and says "look, all these numbers sequentially refer to the date and number of deaths in every major international disaster for the last 50 years" his friend says "Nah, this is just a coincidence".
2. The mysterious people chasing Nic and his son around all look like cut-rate Billy Idol impersonators (or Spike from Buffy impersonators if you are from the younger generation).
3. Apparently the Billy Idol impersonators meant the page of numbers to be a warning – which were immediately sealed for 50 years in a time capsule which gets opened about three days before the predictions run out. So not that useful a warning, really.
4. The earth gets destroyed by a solar flare so massive that it ignites the atmosphere and cooks everything. Even a 10 mile high placard saying "You're going to get roasted by a solar flare" wouldn't have been that much use so providing any warning at all was a bit pointless.
5. Nic says "the radiation from the solar flare will penetrate a thousand miles into the Earth's crust". I'm no expert but I don't think any form of radiation penetrates further than 50 feet or so into solid rock.
6. When the children are taken away we see perhaps 20 other spaceships leaving the earth. Any biologist will tell you that you need several hundred if not several thousand individuals to provide a stable genetic base for a population.
7. The children are taken by the aliens to an idyllic planet but are given two gigantic white rabbits to bring with them. It is unclear whether this is a snack or whether the aliens intend the planet to be a rabbit infested desert in about 20 years.
8. The children are dumped on the eden-planet with only the clothes they stand up in and no understanding of basic farming, fishing or anything useful. I predict that they'll last about a week, maybe two.
End Spoilerationism
Like most recent movies about an apocalypse this film tries to have it cake and eat it by showing the destruction of the planet but also having a hopeful message. In the end this was better than The Day the Earth Stood Bored – which isn't much of a recommendation.