Interesting enough while easy to follow. Don't decide to watch it based on the trailer.

Rating: 7/10 (23 September 2014)

I will warn everyone considering watching this movie not to base the decision too strongly on the trailers. I remember seeing the TV previews many times when it came out, but didn't see it until Fall of 2013. Still, what I expected from the movie because of the trailer was quite different from the actual film. There are several key plot points that they didn't put in the trailer simply because they were too important, but in the short trailer they make it seem like Nicholas Cage's character is the only one. There aren't many main characters, but there are some. It is a fairly balanced mix of disaster and sci-fi, but it is structured more like a drama. The acting from the main parts is pretty good, though I personally found John's kid to be annoying. The story and plot are solid especially at the beginning. After around forty-five minutes the story might not appeal as much some people even though it isn't very difficult to follow, but by that point, you'll probably want to watch the rest simply out of curiosity. I will warn you that if you don't like special effects and creepy images like Frodo in Lord of the Rings or the hallucination scenes in Batman Begins, this movie has a fair amount of that. I would not recommend that you watch it for typical sci-fi action, but it should satisfy people looking for good disaster scenes. Now, I will mark here as a place where the spoilers begin, so if you don't want to have the story or any other elements ruined for you, stop reading here. As I said earlier, it wasn't quite what I was expecting, but it wasn't much better or worse than I was expecting. One of my favorite scenes was the one where John cracks the code of the numbers near the beginning. I also liked how he tried to stop the one event, and how he responded to the one that occurred near him. Granted, it was rather unlikely that he happened to be right at the location of the disaster, but you don't exactly make a sci-fi story about things that are likely to happen to the average person. I was not expecting the element of aliens being thrown in, but it didn't detract from anything in my opinion. When that element was introduced, however, I knew that some viewers might have begun to speculate whether they were getting what they were looking for. The one thing that I was fully disappointed with was the lack of explanation for how the aliens were able to predict or cause the disastrous events that they predicted through Lucinda and Abby. The ending was all around intense. It was a little bit scary with the big spaceship and the demented way that Abby talked about the rabbit she had with her. It was emotional with John having to allow his son to leave him and John's family all facing the apocalypse together. The last shots were the strangest of all especially since you are kind of left to decide for yourself where the two kids are at the end. In summary, it has a pretty good story and the execution is unremarkable in any way. It's not a very fun movie, but that does not mean that it is by any means bad. For once, my decimal rating comes out to a solid integer in an 8/10 overall rating.