Typical Hollywood Stuff

Rating: Null/10 (14 October 2009)

In the 50's an entire class of students made drawings of what they thought the future would look like and proceeded to place them into a time capsule meant to be open in 50 years time. Instead of drawing something,Lucinda,one of the girls from the class,wrote a series of numbers which were whispered into her head by something/someone.Fast forward 50 years and the story continues in the present day with the time capsule being open.The drawings are handed to the kids who attend the school, among them, the paper filled with numbers written by Lucinda which is given to Caleb, one of the students.Nicholas Cage plays John Koestler, the father of Caleb who later stumbles upon this paper.John starts to decipher the numbers and much to his surprise the numbers seem to indicate the date and the location where catastrophes have occurred in the last 50 years. And also how many people died in each event. Three events haven't take place yet and now John makes his mission to try and stop them from happening.As the story moves forward we get the feeling that something in a large scale is going on and as the tension rises there's also a building sense of doom and truth is, it kinda works,the movie,altought very unoriginal, entertains the viewer.The problem of this flick, for me, is the fact that as a viewer you long for answers and when they finally come the film turns into a major let down. In other words, the ending is terrible. It almost seems like the screenwriters didn't know what to do with the rest of the story and thought: what the hell, we might as well go with the aliens stuff.And so, in the end,the individuals we see whispering throughout the whole film are revealed as some sort of hybrid between an angel and an extraterrestrial being and since our planet is about to get destroyed by a solar flare they choose a couple of children and then they leave our planet in their fancy space shift and take the kids to an inhabited planet where mankind can start over.Very Adam and Eve sort of thing.Honestly I couldn't have been more disappointed with the ending,I enjoy alien stuff as much as the next guy but we can't have that in every single movie now, can we? And also the film seemed to be more about destiny versus fate,determinism vs randomness,the ending for me, felt out of place and contrived.Typical Hollywood stuff.Regarding the acting I think Nicholas Cage's performance was below par. I know he's suppose to play this sad and depressed widower but the feeling I got was that he thought he was doing a favor to all of us by playing this character.He performance was almost hard to watch.
My advice is skip the film.
6/10