I was optimistic about this Nicolas Cage film after watching the trailer. Its been a while since he’s been in a good film – actually to be honest I can’t remember a film he has done well in. There was the bubble gum fun of Con Air and The Rock. I didn’t enjoy Leaving Las Vegas and NEXT was so bad it’s not worth mentioning. I have been reminded of Raising Arizona, which was one of the quirky Cohen bros early productions (and I haven’t yet seen Adaptation).
This film is about a young boy – Caleb, who in 2009 is given an envelope that has just come out of a time capsule that has been buried in his school for the last 50 years. Whereas all the other children are given pictures of space ships and flying cars as the children of 1969 were asked to draw their depictions of the future – little Caleb is given a page of numbers. When he gets it home his dad, John (aka Nicolas Cage) can’t sleep as he is grieving his wife’s death and manages to stumble across the numbers. Now luckily for Caleb his dad works at MIT and so he is able to work out that these numbers are accurate predictions of when major world catastrophes will take place and how many people will die in them.
SPOILER WARNING (So far everything I have told you is clearly depicted in the trailer. But if you read on it will spoil the movie for you.)
The movie then wrestles with the question of what you would do if you knew the future. As on the paper are three more dates and death tolls that have not taken place yet. Its an interesting dilemma and could have been a philosophically exciting line to follow in the film – but it is quickly skirted over.
Ever since the piece of paper with numbers has landed in Caleb’s hands he has been seeing spooky blonde haired dark suited men who whisper to him. They also drop strange black stones into his hands while driving pretty lame american cars around.
When we finally work out that this prophecy buried for 50 years is a warning about the End of Everthing we might ask why the spooky blonde guys only gave the world a week’s warning as they were shortsighted enough to leave the prophecy buried for 50 years? What was the point of giving us the future if there was nothing we could do about it?
There are a number of interesting biblical links:
1. Caleb – he was one of the spies into the promised land described in the Old Testament. Caleb along with Joshua was one of only two people of his generation that made it into the promised land – the parallel is that the Caleb in the film is also only one of two people who makes it into the new promised land.
2. John – he was the New Testament prophet who was given a vision of the future that in the Bible is called the book of Revelation.
3. Ezekiel – the book of Ezeikiel features in the movie quite a bit – mainly through a picture that the children colour in. When the space ship finally arrives at the end of the film it does have wheels within wheels – which Ezekiel the prophet describes:
15 As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces. 16 This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like chrysolite, and all four looked alike. Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel. 17 As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not turn about as the creatures went. 18 Their rims were high and awesome, and all four rims were full of eyes all around.
Ezekiel 1:15-18
This picture of God appearing to his people in Exile in Babylon was designed to encourage them that no matter where they went God was with them. in this picture there are also four Angels / spiritual beings and that corresponds with the film’s depiction of the four spooky blonde haired men who are transformed into translucent beings. So they are supposed to be angels in the movie – they are not able to talk however and they do the strange thing with the black stones and why do they have to drive cars?
4. The Tree of life - the two children who make it through to the next life – a new Adam and Eve as it were and they head off towards a beautiful alien tree of life that is described in both the book of Genesis and the book of Revelation – symbolising that God provides human beings with life and he wants us to enjoy life with him – and the pages of the Bible between these opening and closing books describe how God is able to give life to humanity despite human sinfulness.
The film interestingly replaces God with aliens and offers no redemption to the planet only doom with only two children escaping the cataclysm . (There were other pods but I didn’t see anyother people). It plays off of the growing sense of apocalyptic doom that is present in our movies about the future but offers no hope to most of us. The children both brought an rabbit with them – so there are probably echoes of Noah’s ark too…
If you want a different view take a look at my book Destiny… which presents the big story of the Bible in an accessibly way and provides a hope for the future by exploring God’s picture of the end of the beginning in the book of Revelation.
