Good try but an impossible mission

Rating: 8/10 (5 June 2009)

At an elementary school near Boston in 1959, children are asked to create drawings of the future for a time capsule to be opened in 50 years. While most create robots, rocket ships and flying cars, one intense and withdrawn little girl covers a sheet with numbers. Fifty years later Nicholas Cage's son is given the drawing. Cage, an MIT astronomer, realizes the list predicts every major disaster of the previous fifty years. There are three more events on the list. He is nearly killed in one, tries unsuccessfully to avert the other, and finally deduces that the last event predicts the death of everyone on earth.
Cage's son is one of a handful of people to be saved by an alien race. But before then he has terrifying nightmares. In one he looks out his window to see the whole world on fire and animals fleeing through burning trees. I can truthfully say I never saw a flaming moose before.
Cage finally figures out that the cause of the holocaust will be gigantic solar flares.
You just can't pull off an ending like that successfully. If the end of the world happens and some people survive (The Stand, Independence Day), that may make for a good story. If the end happens and everyone dies, and it's our fault (Doctor Strangelove, On The Beach) it's a bummer, but also a cautionary tale. But if everyone dies, and it's not our fault, and there's nothing we can do about it, that's a guaranteed unsatisfying ending. The kids saved by the aliens don't count. They won't remember Beethoven, or the Parthenon, or the Sistine Chapel. Humans continue biologically, but not culturally.
And just what is it with the Nick Cage bashing, anyhow? To hear some people talk he's the worst actor in Hollywood. Is it that he generally portrays characters who stay cool? I see enough people who behave irrationally in a crisis in real life not to want to recreate the experience in a movie.