- For the record, the only reason I saw this was because my friend teaches a class in a city a couple of hours away and I went along for the drive. There happens to be a movie theatre next door to where she teaches her class and this was the only thing scheduled to end at the same time as her class. Normally I steer clear of Nicolas Cage.
- I had no idea what this was about before stepping into the theatre, other than that it was one of those “random series of numbers predicts doom” kind of films. You know, something about math and fate and the supernatural. What you get instead is a super conservative Christian allegory wrapped up in passable CGI and bad acting.
- We’re meant to believe that Nicolas Cage is an astrophysicist professor teaching at MIT. My disbelief, it is not suspended. That aside, we’re shown one of his classes at the start of the film and he’s presenting his class with two possibilities: that the world as we know it is due to determinism and that everything that happens is meant to be, or that everything is a random series of coincidental events that has led us to where we are now. Naturally, as a Scientist™ he believes the latter. We find out later that his estranged father is a pastor and although it’s not explicitly stated, you know the two of them are not on speaking terms because they’ve had ideological differences about whether or not the world is only 4,000 years old and that dinosaurs and people coexisted.
- So, as with other movies like this, the random series of numbers that ol’ Professor Cage gets from a 1959 time capsule turns out to have predicted a whole bunch of man-made and natural disasters in human history from 1959 onward. Ho hum. Naturally, rather than trying to prevent the disasters that have yet to occur, Professor Cage decides to move to the epicentre of the storm instead because that’s naturally the best course of action. When he figures out that the final date is the date that every last person on the planet is going to die, he makes a bee line for ground zero because clearly you’re going to want to be there when the world ends.
- Throughout the movie we see these white-blond scary guys appear to stalk the main characters, and they whisper to the children in the movie, i.e. those who are receptive to their message. They kidnap the kids and bring them to the location specified in the list of not-so-random numbers and eventually our valiant hero meets up with them. Using the children as a conduit, the white-blond guys tell Professor Cage that they have sent out a message into the world to prepare the world for their arrival and that they can only take those with them who have been chosen. Natch, the chosen ones here are the kids, the ones who have been receptive to their message. Everyone else is getting left behind in the mass destruction because, obviously, they have not been saved.
THEN A SPACESHIP COMES DOWN TO EARTH. A SPACESHIP.
The kids ascend with their kidnappers into the ship, Professor Cage decides it’s for the best and lets them, and they fly away in their pointy pine cone ship to one of the other planets in the galaxy that can support carbon-based life.
THE CHILDREN ARE BEGINNING NEW LIFE FOR THE HUMAN RACE ON THE NEW PLANET. I imagine we are meant to infer that they are going to populate the planet with their offspring and I think to take out the “ew, incest” ick factor, we see other pine cone ships in the distance on the new planet, so we’re to assume that other kids have also been kidnapped from earth to help out with this repopulating, just to avoid all the genetic entanglements that having children with your direct relatives would entail.
Also, in case the ultimate goal was unclear in some way, the kids take two rabbits with them to the new planet and there’s a giant Tree of Knowledge in an otherwise wheat-covered landscape.
- As an amusing sidenote, when Professor Cage catches up to one of the guys earlier in the movie and asks who the hell he is, the guy opens his mouth and a bright white light comes shining out. I know that Jesus is the Light of the World and that he is also the Word, but come on do you have to make that light come from this guy’s mouth? Really?
- So after Professor Cage willingly allows his only child to be kidnapped by aliens, he decides to take in the end of the world at his parents’ house, having reconciled with his father over the phone earlier that morning. The planet is being destroyed by a massively huge solar flare from the sun, and his dad had disregarded previous warnings to go hide underground somewhere, saying that if God decided it was his time to go, that was fine with him. The whole family stands around embracing in the living room, preparing for the world to end, when Pastor Dad says “This isn’t the end of the world” i.e. “Onwards to the afterlife!” and Professor Cage, astrophysicist and cynic extraordinaire from earlier in the film, says “I know, this is not the end!” and has an about face on his ideology after seeing everything he has seen and knowing (!!!) what is about to happen. Etc. Science loses, God wins, the audience laughs hysterically.
- At the start of the film, the little girl who was making all the numeric predictions goes missing in the school somewhere. They spend much time in the evening searching for her in the school with the aid of flashlights. Um… it might have been easier to just turn on the lights, perhaps. Less atmospheric, yes, but come on.
- Back to this spaceship. Why? WHY? Why. I was watching Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet the other day and was struck by how often Shakespeare uses ghosts to fill in the blanks for his characters, to the point where it’s almost a case of “Have no other way of explaining things? Use a ghost!” I feel like aliens are the modern equivalent. When in doubt, it’s usually aliens. It feels like a huge cheat and just bad storytelling.
- Nic Cage had an unnecessarily excessive drinking habit in this.
- The muzak playing prior to the start of the film was basically The Boston Pops Symphony Orchestra Plays Radiohead’s OK Computer. I’m not even kidding, it was literally every song from OK Computer in order as they appear on the album.
Knowing
If I’m going to see a movie this religious, it’s a good thing I did it a few days before Easter.
IMDB Plot Synopsis A teacher opens a time capsule that has been dug up at his son's elementary school; in it are some chilling predictions -- some that have already occurred and others that are about to -- that lead him to believe his family plays a role in the events that are about to unfold.
lol, good to know