When a lady very close to me said, “Oh. What a pity. Nicky Cage is starting to get old.”, I began to realise that I was no longer watching the massive box office draw that Nicolas Cage used to be. Judging by his most recent films, he is starting to become a cut-price Tom Hanks and is stretching the ‘Da Vinci Code’ genre of films to new extremes. Knowing is a strange one. While Cage can still deliver the fragility for which his acting has always been renowned and admired, it now appears to be tinged with paranoia. Perhaps he is starting to ‘know’ himself.

The cataclysmic disaster movie has been worked to death in recent years, usually with an eco-twist for good measure. This one is slightly different, in that aliens have been here before and left warnings in the form of an array of numbers scrawled on a schoolgirl’s time capsule exercise. Cage’s offspring (Caleb Koestler played by 10 years old Chandler Canterbury) uncovers the list following the unearthing of the time capsule, some 50 years later. John Koestler (Cage) is an astro-physicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which looks surprisingly realistic, considering that the entire movie was shot in Australia (!), who becomes fascinated by the numbers and eventually establishes that they represent not only the dates of major international disasters but also the numbers of fatalities that occur.

The relevance of them is brought home to him, when he is a close observer to a plane crash and he then works out that there are three more disasters to come before…well, Armageddon. The direction of the film by Alex Proyas (I, Robot and The Crow) is quite ingenious, in that he concentrates on the characters and not the major incidents. As a result, instead of feeling broad and involving, the film has a strangely and mildly upsetting claustrophobia to it, which is quite clever, considering that the end of the world is nigh.

The final conclusion was not what I expected it to be, which was something quite daring to undertake, although the inevitability of strange shadowy, humanoid creatures that morph into grotesque aliens that you always swear you have seen before in other movies (clearly some cost-cutting in action here) was verging on crassness. I found the start of the movie mildly confusing, the middle moderately engaging but the end decidedly weak. Clever, but weak all the same. I sincerely hope that this is not the end of a fine actor, as I have invariably enjoyed Mr Cage’s prior performances. Not a ‘feel-good’ film, for sure.