Knowing when to walk away, knowing when to run...

Rating: 2/10 (25 March 2009)

My goodness, where to begin. Lets just begin at the beginning. There are going to be some spoilers in this one as it is necessary to make a point.
A friend of mine told me this was one of the most mind-blowing movies he had ever seen. He was correct. That someone freed $50,000,000 of cold hard cash to make this cut and paste drivel definitely blew my friggin' mind.
I didn't have high expectations for this movie, hadn't even planned on seeing it, but I held out a little hope because I loved Dark City so much. Those meager hopes were dashed against the rocks.
Lets start with the first contrivance of a distant introverted young girl, Lucinda, in 1959 who hears voices. Its her idea (we learn through awkward exposition, exposition that sadly never learns to walk) that her elementary school drop a time capsule into the ground to be excavated 50 years into the future. The children are assigned to draw what they think the future will look like, the art to be placed within the capsule. Lucinda furiously scribbles a series of numbers on her paper. It is put into the capsule.
Fast forward 50 years.
October 2009. Heat wave. Indian summer. Nicholas Cage is showing his son some cosmic formation in his telescope. Without warning his son admonishes him for never listening, forgetting school events, and generally being a neglectful father. While this is done through more awkward exposition, what is more maddening is that Cage spends the entire movie being an almost overbearingly doting father, rushing to events, forgoing outings with friends and potential blind dates that would replace is dead wife. One would think that perhaps he is turning over a new leaf after 5 minutes, but his best friend informs us this is not the case.
Cage is an MIT professor, though we never learn what type we can only assume astrophysics. We only see him teach one class. And what would a professor, inhabiting an acclaimed technical college, in a classroom surrounded by equations on a chalkboard, images of celestial bodies, and a model of the solar system assign for his students at the end of the class? Write a paper on determinism vs randomness. Does life have meaning. In a physics class.
Naturally, his son is singing at the event to open the time capsule. Naturally, he receives Lucinda's paper filled with indecipherable numbers. Naturally, he brings it home when he's not supposed to. Naturally, Cage sees it. He sends his son to bed and in a inexplicable drunken rage deciphers most of the numbers, starting with the first number, picked at random: 911012889. In two seconds he discovers that it means 9/11/01 and the number who perished. Baffled and enraged he spends all night finding the dates and casualties of major human tragedies and googling them for confirmation. We won't mention that casualty estimates often very by source and more so for natural disasters and large numbers. He verifies every major tragedy for 50 years on this paper, including the event where his wife died. Except there are 3 events that have yet to occur.
What does an astrophysicist do with this info? Takes it to his friend who predictable tells him in copy and pasted dialogue how crazy this all sounds and he's taking his wife's death too hard. And what do the rest of the numbers mean? After half a glass of whisky he found the first date from the first set of numbers he looked at, after a whole bottle and a sleepless night he found the rest, but it took his trucks GPS product placement ad to find out the rest of the numbers are latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. Naturally, he is at the location of the next accident just as he discovers this, a hideous plane crash complete with passengers running around covered in jet fuel and fire. This is where the audience laughter begins. It never stopped.
The dialogue is maddeningly formulaic, awkward, and uninspired. The acting ranges from sub par to excruciating. The story is as predictable as Wednesday's meatloaf. When Cage's son, who can hear the voices, starts writing down more numbers, even after the final revelation, Cage dismisses it as his son's impetuousness. The whole event is a contrived plot device.
One wonders why he is estranged from his father, a pastor, and family. One wonders why he doesn't take his discovery to the other MIT scientists. One wonders why he feels the pressing need to run headlong towards the disasters he knows will happen, only to be saved by dumb luck. One wonders whether anyone involved in the making of this film has ever been to MIT for longer than the time it takes to create B roll or has ever stood on a New York City subway platform.
I won't even mention the sci-fi allusions to the Christian concept of rapture.
In the end this movie is a spectacular disappointment. It is a fun concept amateurishly executed on every conceivable level.