Such wasted potential

Rating: 2/10 (29 April 2009)

Note: This is my first review, so if it is a little choppy I apologize.
This film starts off with an elementary school boy receiving a paper, with seemingly random printed numbers, from a time capsule buried 50 years before. After some difficulty, John (the child's father), decodes the numbers hidden meaning and realizes that the numbers have correctly predicted every disaster from the past 50 years.
At first glance it seems like a good premise to the film. Unfortunately, it does not continue on the same path. After all that John's child, Caleb, begins hearing all these sounds coming from an unknown group of people called "The Whisper People". These same people are the primary reason of the downfall of this movie.
These people continually haunt Caleb and Abby (one of the later characters introduced in the movie who is about the same age as Caleb). The two parents of these two lovely children act incredibly stupid because they do not seem to realize that whenever they leave the children alone "The Whisper People" seem to magically come out of nowhere. On one occasion I remember John ends up chasing on of the people into the forest, only to be blinded by a very large blue light that comes out of the dude's mouth; at this precise moment in the movie I completely lost faith in it having any amount of logic whatsoever.
As the plot goes on, it is realized that the last prediction of the numbers is an apocalyptic type event that will kill everyone. This makes John very emotional (which is quite funny considering Nicholas Cage is portraying him). In the end we are told that "The Whisper People" are actually guardian angels of some sort that were protecting everyone after all(big surprise). OK, think about that for one second, guardian angel alien type things sent to protect us, we don't even know were they are from or who sent them. Why, you may ask. Simply because the movie NEVER tells us. Now I don't know about you but that bit of information would have been rather intriguing but I guess we will never know.
The kids are taken by those alien guard things and are set off somewhere to "start over". Where are they sent? Again, I don't know because the movie conveniently leaves out some important information.
The actual scene where the children are taken is laughable at best. They are taken in this clear glowing globe looking thing of some sort of thing. They then go up into the "larger ship" I suppose which looks more to me like spinning top. Imagine looking at a large glowing CGI spinning top in the sky and you pretty much have the the ship.
What happens to John? Luckily the movie actually *gasp* answers this question. He goes to see and wait out the event with his family. He then reconciles with his father who he has had a grudge against (grudge is not known of course) and turns to religion in a way after being an atheist the entire movie.
To sum it all up this movie just left out too much information to be considered good. I would have loved to know more about those guardian angel beings. Also Nicholas Cage was not a good choice for the lead role in this movie. I'm not saying he isn't a good actor but seeing him go all emotional just makes me laugh instead of sympathize. Lastly, the film just got to unbelievable. I'm not saying that a paper with random numbers predicting every known disaster from 50 years is believable, I'm just saying that a bunch of guardian angel other worldly beings is just completely illogical in way I feel my knowledge is being challenged in a way. I mean even the list of number predictions has some logic, it's a phenomena called Pareidolia. If the movie would have stayed on the same course it started instead of drifting off into the realm of illogical things, it would have been a much better film. Unfortunately it did not do that.