Director: Alex Proyas
Year Released: 2009
Rating: 1.5
MIT professor Nicolas Cage's son comes into the possession of a strange document from a time capsule that contains the locations and dates of various disasters (plus, conveniently, the fatality count of each disaster!) and so Dad, astrophysics number geek he is, turns into John Nash and tries to decipher when future crises are likely to occur. The whole debate as to whether or not our lives have a purpose or whether things occur strictly by accident is a fascinating one but the film then plays into the whole Culture of Fear thing, starting with frequent mentions of 9/11 and ending with the actual apocalypse: it's playing into the religious fanatic's notion that we're all doomed and that the decision to work together for a better world is out of our hands as a people. Not helping matters is the heinous, poorly designed CGI - the Subway disaster is all kinds of ugly - and appearance of Super Aliens out of some video game ready to repopulate another planet. Instead of being able to find a way to save ourselves, we can only wait for our own incineration.
