Like a Black Hole: It pulls you in, keeps you hanging, and then squashes you!

Rating: 7/10 (21 April 2009)

The story starts out with a fantastic mystery. A young, albeit antisocial, girl seems to see and/or hear things her peers do not. Told to do a project for a time capsule, she begins writing down the numbers she hears in her head. Immediately we're drawn in wanting to know more about why she is obsessed with these numbers.
When we're forwarded to the modern day, Cage happens to come by the sheet of numbers and quickly figures out what they are. OK, this is probably a bit abrupt. He's a little "too brilliant" in that area; however, we're drawn further into the mystery because some of the numbers are as yet unexplained! The picture progresses nicely, and Cage's character meets an attractive young woman who also has a child about the age of Cage's boy thus adding the secondary story of love. Also a bit abrupt, it's adds an enjoyable element to the story so we can overlook the quickness of the romantic development.
Some further action, adventure, and suspense follows, and it's good enough to push you close to the edge of your seat as we make our way toward the end of the flick, but here's where they really dropped the ball.
Cage, good father that he is, coaxes his son to go ahead and leave with some nice aliens. "It's OK," he says. "They could have killed you before but didn't."
Not only is this unsound logic (they could have killed you but didn't; therefore, they must be harmless), but no father in his right mind would ever send his son away into the unknown by having him beamed up into a never-seen-before crystalline orb piloted by creatures who felt it was in the boy's best interest to leave the father behind on Earth to die.
And it gets worse! At the end, we find these 12-something year old children paired up (male-female) and dropped off alone in the vicinity of their own individual snow white Tree of Life. How will they live? How many 12 year old kids do we know who are perfectly capable of fending for themselves???
It's an enjoyable story -- worth seeing. I give it 7/10 because the acting was good, I liked the mystery, it had a little love story too, but the ending was ludicrous as it could get.
My recommendation is it's not necessary to spend full theater prices. At least get a discount or wait for the video so you don't feel at all slighted.