Director: Alex Proyas
Writers: Ryne Douglas Pearson (story/screenplay) and Juliet Snowden & Stiles White (screenplay)
Release Date: 20 March 2009
Cast:
Nicolas Cage ... John Koestler
Chandler Canterbury ... Caleb Koestler
Rose Byrne ... Diana Wayland
D.G. Maloney ... The Stranger
Lara Robinson ... Lucinda Embry / Abby Wayland
Nadia Townsend ... Grace Koestler
Alan Hopgood ... Rev. Koestler
Adrienne Pickering ... Allison
Joshua Long ... Younger Caleb
Danielle Carter ... Miss Taylor (1959)
Alethea McGrath ... Miss Taylor (2009)
David Lennie ... Principal Clark (1959)
Tamara Donnellan ... Lucinda's Mother
Travis Waite ... Lucinda's Father
Ben Mendelsohn ... Phil Beckman
MPAA: Rated PG-13 for disaster sequences, disturbing images and brief strong language.
Runtime: 121 min
2003, “Matchstick Men”, the last good Nicolas Cage movie, coinciding with the start of his relationship with Lisa Marie Presley. Hmmm. 1991, “Dangerous”, the last good Michael Jackson album, coinciding with the start of his relationship with Lisa Marie Presley. Hmmm. 1968, “Elvis”, the last good Elvis Presley appearance later dubbed his comeback coinciding with the start of his relationship with Lisa Marie Presley. Hmmm. We all know how it ended for Elvis, Michael isn’t doing much better, so why, oh dear lord why!, is Nicolas Cage still getting paid?
Needless to say unless you’ve never looked at one of my reviews before, but they are riddled with spoilers, plot points and generally incoherent rants.
The story is actually pretty solid, at least in the beginning. Dad, Cage, is having trouble dealing with the death of his wife and relating to his son. Son isn’t deaf, but has what I will call hearing dyslexia where the words get jumbled up as he hears them. So the kid’s got a hearing aid and it squeaks during a ceremony at school where a 50 year time capsule it being opened and notes from the kids of the 1950s are being handed to the kids of the 2000s.
Not deaf kid gets a weird note which is two pages filled with numbers. Luckily, Cage is a raging alcoholic who’d curiosity is piqued while binge drinking. He plays with the numbers and discovers they correlate to disasters on a time line running out in the next few weeks. Oh, did I mention that he’s supposed to be an MIT professor. Well the director barely points it out either, since it would be difficult to reconcile how retarded Cage’s professor acts to his being a teacher at MIT. Oh, and even though he gets the date and number of dead, it takes another ridiculous happenstance for him to figure out the ‘unknown’ numbers refer to longitude and latitude, which almost any boy scout or hard core video game player or generic puzzle solver could have told him.
Then we are treated to the tired routine of crazy Cage, where he runs around in a bewildered way and for no logical reason places himself at the epicenter of a predicted disaster. Oh my god, what an effing moron. He’s already tried to track down the little girl who wrote the original numbers, but she’s dead. But wait, she has a super-hot daughter, Rose Byrne, whose kid bears an uncanny resemblance to the dead Lucinda-mostly because the same actress plays young Lucinda and the daughter. More crazy running around and finally they work out that the entire planet is toast, literally toast. Nothing to stop it and no way to escape this fate.
Wait though, there are these dudes who look like an Icelandic synth-pop band from the mid 1980s. Only they aren’t singing weirdly mis-worded pop songs, they are aliens, or are they angels, or are they child molesters? You be the judge, the kids call them ‘the whisperers’ which sounds more molester-y. They have a really cool kinda spaceship looking thing, that could be pop band but I’ll check it off as alien. Then they also seem to have wings, without drinking Red Bulls, which seemed like angels to me.
So the world is ending, you got Nic Cage and hot Rose Byrne (get it, hot – Byrne, get it?) running around like lunatics, you got child-molesting alien angels walking around and whispering to kids, you got the kids who are just a little bit creepy and a whole crescendo of activity as the rest of the planet is figuring out that we are screwed and then…
Holy crap does this thing end miserably. Like French New Wave badly.
Hot Rose Byrne gets wasted but a truck. In an awesome twist that truck was driven by Glenn Close.
Nicolas Cage is a bit too old for the child molesting alien angels so he drives through parts of Australia meant to look like parts of Boston to find his religious father, mother and his sister so we get a Kum Ba Ya circle with the atheist (maybe agnostic) reconciled to his god and his family.
The kids get dropped off on some wild planet with amber waves of grain and a big ass tree. In support of the child molesting, the kids are now wearing clothes completely different to anything kids wear these days.
And, oh yeah, you and me and every damn thing on Earth is reduced to molten lava. Good luck to the people hiding a mile or so underground, maybe you get to die slowly.
How much more upbeat can a movie get?
The acting is mostly horrendous. I know Nicolas Cage has all but given up on being a real person, but he brought zero depth to John Koestler. The man won an Oscar for playing a suicidal drunk and yet he is completely unconvincing as a drunk in this crap. Worse yet he seems to elicit bad performances from the people around him. The kid playing his son might as well have been a robot for the emotional range he showed. If the audience is supposed to see a big sacrifice as father and son are separated at the end, then there just wasn’t enough invested in these two for it to pay off. I’ve seen bigger emotional reactions to kids going off to two week summer camps. (Yes, it was me and I only cried until the bus got to the highway.)
Rose Byrne was good and did I mention hot, but she’s also hamstrung by the hamming up of Cage. In fact if there were other people in this movie I apologize for not seeing you around the over-acting of Mr. Cage.
As for the directing, well besides the shame on you for letting Cage chew scenery, there’s the whole what the eff was the point of this whole movie. Granted I was laughing at the brutal and yet funny special effects like the silly looking plane crash and the impossibly over the top subway derailment, but did you really have to put wings on the floating aliens? And you could have cut like ten minutes out of the bloated run time by having that spaceship open up in a nice and simple fashion. Like I began this review the story started out strong and like that subway derailed badly, that is the director’s fault.
A few annoyances. Why is an MIT professor driving a pick-up truck? How many pay phones are there any more? How do calls between cell phones not work, but pay phone to cell phone calls are still okay? How many Australian car tags are there on Bostonian roads?
The perceptual phenomenon of people looking for patterns in randomness (number strings, faces in trees, shapes in clouds etc.) is called Pareidolia. It is also called a really bad idea for a movie, see “The Number 23”.
If knowing is half the battle, not seeing “Knowing” is winning the war.
