How to ruin a great story with a lousy movie

Rating: 3/10 (21 March 2009)

You're talking to a guy that owns 2 35mm Movie cameras and a sound rig whose best reason for not making a film is not having a worthwhile script. Perhaps we could say conversely that a good reason for not writing a script is not having a worthwhile film to make of it?
The story premise here was great - young prophetic girl makes cryptic predictions encoded numerically and they get buried in a time capsule in 1959, to be unearthed 50 years later... oh, the possibilities!...which get unearthed and perused by a guy who teaches astrophysics at MIT, no stranger to numbers, he. Once this is accomplished, you can forget about this monstrosity of a film. Guessable? I pretty much guessed the ending about ten minutes into the film and if you saw "Deep Impact" so will you. Apocalyptic predictions? Telescope? Astrophysics? Duuuuh. What first promises to be a suspenseful film quickly becomes formulaic and sophomoric.
I gave it two more stars for special effects, and these are wonderful, if you can painfully endure the film. Cage looks like he stopped in the wrong studio that day, that's how miscast he is. The young actor who plays Caleb is wooden and unconvincing. The Abby/Lucinda girl was one of the best performers and had few lines. Some of the bit actors turned in better performances than the stars. I pity those young people who got cast in this film hoping for a break and ended up in this groaner of a movie.
The whole premise of the "Strangers" who pop in and out was ridiculous. Unfortunately these four (as in Horsemen? Double DUH) 'characters' are needed for the ending, which was welcome but entirely laughable. Once the predictions are unearthed, it seems the movie just borrows every cheap device they can, from "DaVinci Code" to "National Treasure" to "The Matrix" with a bit of "Deep Impact" and a dose of disaster movie mayhem. Even the special effects scenes get old, the train scene is way too long and obviously is extended to burn screen time. And like the train in the scene, this movie derails, jumps the tracks, and destructively skids out of control .
The continuity is a mess, so many things are left hanging for too long, so long that by the time they're tied together you just don't care. There's a sudden quick cut (when cage takes the blackboard and puts it on the wall, towards the beginning) that I thought was going to be part of one of those "jump cut" scenes but its not followed by any others and ends up looking like an editing mistake. Terrible!
The cinematography is really good, what a shame! Some of these scenes were hard to shoot and came off well but were edited poorly.
All in all, I left wondering if those last numbers Lucinda scratched in the wall were the Release date of this film and the number of casualties...which miraculously coincided with the number of cast. A real waste of time.