Tightly Woven and Philosophically Interesting

Rating: 10/10 (6 July 2014)

I'm not a big fan of Nicholas Cage, and from some of the other reviews I wasn't holding out a lot of hope for this one, but it works--really well.
For those who say the plot if full of holes, you need to watch it again. Roger Ebert was correct that everything little thing in this movie fits together perfectly. That is rare in thrillers.
Those who say the ending doesn't work, are probably biased one way or the other. If you are averse to religious themes, you won't like the implications of angels. If you are religious, you'll think the alien implications are cheesy. For me, I was waiting until the end of the movie--when you know it must be one or the other--ready to hate the choice Proyas made. Instead, I loved it because he doesn't tell you what it is. He lets it be both. If you are a literalist, you will probably hate this and think it's a cop-out. I took it as a simple metaphor of hope for meaning in a pretty hopeless world.
This is a thinking person's movie. And one question it grapples with is: what are the limits of scientific knowledge? We can trace the origins of everything back to the Big Bang, but what happened before that, and why is there anything instead of nothing? The movie doesn't tackle this directly, but it does indirectly. I'm not religious and don't believe in spirits or souls, but I loved this movie for how well it is crafted and how it got me thinking.
There is one significant flaw. The scene where Cage's character is in the classroom at MIT defining "determinism" and "randomness" is grossly inaccurate. He says that if everything is determined beforehand, then (there is a designer involved and therefore) there is meaning. This is simply not true. Determinism implies only inexorable cause-and-effect, not a designer. He is thinking of "fatalism," and that is what this movie is about (and is something scientists don't study). Obviously, not everything is determined if the strangers (as Proyas calls them in the commentary) can decide things. They are creating the fates of the people on earth, while also leaving room for free choices. These ideas run deep in Western culture, and it is interesting to see them explored here, which is why this one flaw is excusable.
While watching the movie, pay close attention to the motivations of each of the characters. To me, they played out beautifully.
I take this movie to be an excellent sci-fi fable on the themes of fate and free will. Where do we come from? Is there any meaning in life? My own personal beliefs don't align with the director's, but he does a great job of illustrating what probably the majority of people in Western cultures do believe and have believed for thousands of years (I'm speaking of transcendent meaning in life, not of aliens).
Worth watching--and more than once.