Knowing.

I know, I know. It's been almost two weeks since I started this blog and I haven't gotten around to doing a thing with it yet. I said I was going to start on my own personal collection, and I'm gonna get to that gradually, but I actually watched a new movie last night with Angela, so I figured I should review that while it's fresh.

So yes. Knowing. Can I get a "double-you tee eff" up in here?

Let's start with the premise. Back in 1959, a little girl named Lucinda, who is a very brooding and tortured little girl who hears "whispers," suggests that her school place a time capsule in the ground for 50 years, which will hold within it pictures from all the students in her class depicting what they think the future will look like in 50 years. The pictures are mostly generic space-age Jetsons-looking stuff, but Lucinda's is... special. As in, it's just a whole ton of random numbers filling the paper to the brim on both sides. But, her "picture" gets put in the time capsule anyway, and after another scene showing her tortured by whispers, we fast-forward to Nicolas Cage in 2009. His son attends the same elementary school Lucinda did, and when they open the time capsule, he gets Lucinda's picture to see. He brings it home and his father (after about the third gallon of alcohol consumed over the course of the movie) ends up accidentally deciphering a sequential code within the numbers. Turns out the numbers aren't so random (gasp!), are actually dates predicting major disasters (what the criteria for "major" disaster is we're never given), as well as the number of people that would perish in the tragedies. Cage checks them all, and they show up to have been true, except for three dates that haven't happened yet... but will within the next week! Dun dun duh!!

Okay, so it's a shaky premise to begin with (the "whispering ones" that torture Lucinda end up torturing Cage's poor boy as well and are eerie as all get out, especially considering what they turn out to be), but that's not what bothers me about this movie. I can deal with shaky premises so long as the end result is compelling (or at least well done). It's not even that this movie isn't well done (I'd argue that it isn't).

Basically, this movie is the most hopeless film I have ever watched.

There is no happy ending. No matter how you try to look at it, this movie ends in horrible calamity, with only a raw, untapped glimmer of hope left for humanity (yes, for all of humanity). It strings you along for about half the movie in the hopes that maybe Cage will actually be able to help someone through learning about these dates (he doesn't) until the final fourth of the movie, where everything unravels into a pit of despair the likes of which even Westley from The Princess Bride would've dreaded.

I think they made this movie with the likes of Deep Impact and Contact in mind, hoping that we'd look at the special effects as "cool enough to justify the story," but I just can't bring myself to say it. The acting, apart from Cage, is about as unconvincing as it gets (the boy they got made Jake Lloyd look like Macaulay freakin' Culkin), the plot is so telegraphed it reads like a made-for-TV-movie, and the ending... ohhhh, the ending.

Ultimately, the movie is just too darn depressing. There really aren't any high points in the movie. It starts out low and goes downhill from there, hitting you again and again with slaps of tragedy left and right. Not Hamlet tragedy, which serves a purpose, but The Day After Tomorrow tragedy, which is just frightening and horrible.

RECOMMENDATION: Don't. Just don't. It doesn't make you think. It doesn't make you excited. It doesn't make you happy. It just makes you depressed. Not my idea of a good time.

RATING: 3. It wasn't B-list fodder, and the effects are pretty cool, but if I wanted to learn about the end of the world, I'd read actual info about it, not take Nicolas Cage's word on it.