Alex Proyas' Waterloo

Rating: 3/10 (29 April 2009)

Nic Cage gets knocked enough these days, so I'll go easy on him. He didn't do anything particularly great or noticeably bad in this film. There's a sort of generic quality to the way he plays a character, and it's very hard to believe that he's really some kind of physics professor, but those are small beans in the larger picture. For me, the film was really a disappointment when you consider it as a film not only directed by but produced by Alex Proyas.
Cage plays an MIT professor, and the movie gets no more realistic from this point on. His son (Chandler Canterbury) receives a prophetic string of numbers in a school-related time capsule, and he believes that these prophecies must have come to him for a reason, perhaps so he could prevent the tragedies.
Proyas has always seemed to have some amount of trouble with the conclusions of his movies. They never seem to deliver on the promise of his stylish philosophizing earlier in the films. In "The Crow", that could perhaps be explained away by the premature death of his leading man, Brandon Lee. But even his best film, "Dark City", devolves at a certain point into a rather standard effects driven action sequence. Usually a certain note of poignancy is added right at the very end which acts in some measure to redeem this. What we get in this film is a corny scene of the 2 kids being ushered into some nirvana place. I thought the film would have been much stronger if it had been more ambiguous in the end. No doubt is left in the audience's mind as to the fate of all these characters, including the children. I would have liked it better if it was more open ended. I thought it would be great if the "whisperers" could be seen as either angels or devils. That would be closer to Arthur Clarke's "Childhood's End", which seems to have been an inspiration to the writers (along with perhaps that old stand-by "Chariots of the Gods", with its references to Ezekiel and UFO phenomena). The whisperers reminded me of the "watchers" from "Dark City", and I thought it would have been neat if it had been left open enough that I could imagine that they had actually kidnapped these children to take them into outer space for some kind of experiment. Maybe they shaved their heads and became the watchers. But the film slammed the door on that possibility and every other possibility as well.
There is an atheist interpretation of this movie floating around as well as a theist interpretation. Neither of them makes complete sense because this movie doesn't make complete sense. If the whisperers were going to kidnap the kids in the mom's SUV anyway, then why did they go through all the stuff with the prophecies and the little black stones and all of that? If they are "angels", then why do they go around dressed up like they're going to a NIN concert? It only makes sense internally, in terms of the logic of how the story unfolds, but it doesn't make sense when you try to put it all back together after the film is over. The only way I can make sense of it is in the theist interpretation: if the whisperers are biblical "angels", and if they represent "God", then their motives are incomprehensible. I detected a stronger Jewish religious theme in this movie than Christian -- this was the God of Job. The Cage character here lost his wife in a fire, a vague reference to the story of Lot. The film explicitly references Ezekiel. And in contrast to the Christian notion of apocalypse and salvation through Grace, these "angels" only save those who have been chosen for what seem to be arbitrary reasons, and they torture those who they choose with prophecy and madness for no reason that can be rationalized in human reason (the Christian God is always reasonable, as if he were invented by Aristotle, but the Hebrew God is rarely logical).
However the theist interpretation of the movie bores me and combined with the rather cut-and-dried ending of the film makes me feel like I've seen something closer to dogma than to scientific speculation. That's why the movie reminded me of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", another faux-SF movie that drapes itself in the clothes of science but is truly a story about faith. In an extremely awkward and obviously contrived scene set in Cage's classroom, we're presented with a naive dichotomy of the nature of the universe -- it's either completely random, or it has a logical order because God chooses what happens. However, naturalism actually holds that the universe proceeds along the lines of predictable physical causes and effects, the very opposite of the "random." What is actually "random" is the idea of a God coming along and deciding to, say, put certain kids on a spaceship and repopulate the human race with them. But the movie would try to convince us of the exact opposite -- that a universe predicated strictly on natural law would somehow be inherently unpredictable because it has no "purpose."
Please -- if you're going to make a SF movie, you have to give us science. Not ridiculous Nic Cage as an MIT professor who doesn't understand the basic tenets of science. The way I see this movie, it was an elaborate straw man argument.