Knowing. If only the producers had known how it might be received. I'll spare the pastiche and get down to brass tacs. It's just my opinion, but this film is a big pile of shit. If this film were food, it would be luke-warm, unsweetened porridge. The plot is thus:
A man loses his wife. That man is a teacher at MIT. He has a son and teaches astrophysics. He has scientific beliefs incompatible with his family's religious beliefs and struggles to identify with them, becoming a depressed alcoholic, lingering in his basement like some pathetic boogey man. His scientific beliefs are seemingly nihilistic. Meanwhile, 50 years after the burying of a group of students' time capsule, his only son receives a former student's 'imagining' of the future which turns out to be a piece of paper with numbers scribbled all over it. Mayhem ensues as he starts to see patterns in the numbers. Duh, duh, duh!
The plot is very, very fast-paced. So much so that it starts to lack coherence, straying into the realms of the impossible and the stupid. It's punctuated with two small-scale events - small-scale in relation to the massive arse piece which comes last - involving much mayhem and panicked people who are often depicted on fire and mostly don't make a huge deal of sense.
The final event, which is, I'm sorry to say, a coronal mass ejection (otherwise known as a solar flare) is pointless in relation to the other two events - they seem to have been included only to keep a few morons from straying out due to hysterical boredom.
I was hoping for some terribly revealing finalé involving the son decrying his father as a superstitious old git but all I was greeted with was one scene in which Cage reconciles his beliefs and gives in to his father's ignorant whims - thus being eviscerated by the oncoming ball of flames and intense radiation - and another scene in which albino aliens whisk the two children off to some far-flung planet in a ship made of nothing but spires of light, only to leave them on the planet in some other-worldly scene reminiscent of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; except in this garden nothing but bullshit grows.
After scouting around for reviews and looking at what the amateurs had to say, I was apalled to find not one coherent review - rather reviews written by young morons professing the greatness of this steaming shit-pile of a movie (and also alluding to the predictions of Nostradamus and other such nonsense). It didn't really leave much of an impression on me - excepting the horrible shit-induced wretching - and I wouldn't advise you go see it. Don't listen to me, though; go and waste seven quid on it if you must. In places it's promising, but that promise gives way to silly novelty (such as the stones given by the albino aliens known as the whispering people) and religious hogwash, culminating in an easily predictable, but altogether underwhelming, ending.
Out of 10 stars, I'd probably give it a single nugget of decaying dog shit - it's just that bad.
Adendum (18/4/2009): Okay, there were a few rational reviews I encountered after re-scouting but I'm still reluctant to think there could be people out there who've actually enjoyed seeing this film. If you've seen it, tell me what you think.
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