You never really know what you’re gonna get with a Nicolas Cage movie. As part of the continuing Nicolas Fkn Cage series here at the DMR, we explore a different chapter here. The question is, how different?
50 years after an elementary school puts a time capsule in the ground. One of the submissions may be a little odd. Nic Cage’s son gets to open that entry. Instead of a grade-school kid’s imaginative drawing of what the future may bring (yeah, space ships and robots, stupid kids. They were totally off by, like 20 years, Pfft!), Caleb’s envelope from weird girl Lucinda is nothing but numbers. Fortunately for us all, his father Nic Cage (character names be damned) is an astrosomething-or-other professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and finally realizes this is something different. You don’t say? Can he crack the code? Would it be a movie if he didn’t? He does uncover a disturbing pattern from the numbers, since he’s, youknow, smaht. It gets a bit melodramatic and slow for awhile but it does actually kinda pick it up there at the end!
I think this is the reason why Alex Proyas has never been a top-tier director for me. Sure, he takes on some cool stories and makes em look pretty cool, this one being no exception. But it’s just the spoon-fed nature of them, pretty predictable as it plays out, so much foreshadowing, so transparent, and always overly dramaticized to get there. The Crow? Fine. Soundtrack better than the movie. Dark City? Cool. Kinda basic, neat concept from what I remember, and even slightly pre-Matrixy but without the cool bullet-time SFX. I, Robot? Originally a good story, but pretty shitty treatment of the source material and the inclusion of Will Smiff. This one? Another cool concept, ups the Smiff ante with a Cage. And a nice play with the Science vs Spiritual themes. It does get a bit Catastrophic here. Always interesting to see presentation of justifications of perhaps one over the other. It does deviate from the normal Hollyweird Larger Narrative that’s been pushed on us for 30 years now, and for that, I think I enjoyed it a little bit more. Other than that? It didn’t suck. Could’ve been shorter and maybe less eye-rolling yeah-we-get-it kind of setup. But ultimately for a sci-fi thriller, it follows a decent thread.
