'I Robot' guy needs oil-change...

Rating: Null/10 (20 November 2011)

Utter tripe. The kind of movie 'Signs' could have been if Night Shyamalan had a death-wish (instead of merely wanting to sink his own career). Nicholas Cage's miserable, bereaved astrophysicist is handed a page full of numbers retrieved from a school's time capsule buried 50 years previously. Somehow, he works out that these numbers are a code that reveals when and where (but, unfortunately not HOW) certain disasters will occur, and the accurate death toll therein. Will this enable him to find some 'meaning' in everything, instead of just the random nastiness he suspects? This mildly amusing notion is rapidly flushed away in a toilet of dizzying, technically swish but ultimately pointless special effects (read 'body count orgies') and predictable 'apparitions' heralding much worse to come. Much worse for the world, and the movie... Alex Proyas gleefully has the planet torched as the finale (thanks Alex, that was...special) but the Cage character's young son and the daughter of his New Best Friend are spirited away by some seriously unconvincing aliens (duuhhhh!) to a delightful, sunny, pastoral new planet to 'start everything again'. Oh well, that's OK then...! Cage's performance (and indeed everyone else's) is, fittingly, by the numbers. Mr. Proyas, if tired of film making as this burnt offering would suggest, may do well to study astrophysics himself: more work needed on the effects of solar flares! ***0*** Two Glasses Later: actually, this piffle looks a whole lot better if you can view it as a bile-laden swipe at the movie 'system'. It would sort of make sense if it was a warning about everything in the industry being down to brutal (commercial) numbers that leave production possibilities on rails to a specific destiny -making expensive, effects-bound nonsense like this very movie! Because however awful they are, they will pay out ('Pearl Harbour', for example). It will all end with the inferno that engulfs good and bad, creative and dull alike. Just a thought...