Knowing me, knowing you - if you can suspend belief go see

Rating: 7/10 (30 March 2009)

A time capsule buried underneath a school in the nineteen fifties. Exhumed five decades later provides the gryst for this movie which will put you through the mill, if you let it inside your head for a couple of hours.
I've just sat through it, in the cinema. Nicolas Cage - why the long face - plays Professor John Koestler is drawn into a seeming conspiracy which has shades of menace, terrorism and Armageddon.
This is pure science-fiction. It's stylish, thrill a minute stuff really. There are special effects. Some of them are stunning. A traffic jam on a crowded highway late in the afteroon - a downpour and a stricken airliner suddenly fills the screen. It hits the ground an the inferno is instant. A few survivors, some on fire stagger out of the wreckage. This is as real as you can get, given the screaming multi channel soundtrack.
It all revolves around a sheet of handwritten numbers - placed in the capsule by a ten year old girl Lucinda Embrey back in 1959. Cage's character manages to work out that the numerical sequence is not random, but points to almost every large scale disaster of the second half of the twentieth century - right up to present day. There are three disasters to come. The air crash is the first of them, and his presence on the scene is no coincidence.
Sooon he meets the daughter of the number scribbler - though I must say the handwriting would win awards in any class of ten year olds. Rose Byrne...slim and suspicious at first rejects the Prof. but before long she is 'knowing' something's up. Her daughter Abbie, played by the same lass who played Lucinda in the early scenes.
Menacing strangers in black coats seem to stalk Koestler's Son, Caleb, and a series of black, polished pebbles seem to be emitting messages from a mysterious source..
A hugely destructive 'accident' below ground and an undercurrent of F.B.I. involvement keeps the audience guessing until close to the end.
This movie requires a suspension of belief, like so many others. There are flaws but if you can overlook them, enjoy the effects and the fanciful premise of the plot then it's a rewarding case of 'The Day After Tomorrow' meets 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' If science fiction is your thing, and it's not usually mine you'll enjoy it, but might argue with the ending. I've noticed more and more films having bleak endings lately, but this one offers hope, if not for the more down to earth.
As the two younger cast members gambol in their brave new world they're are left wondering what's for tea, there's always rabbit stew.