2009, Alex Proyas (Dark City) -- Tubi
Of note, I am sure so very sure I had this plugged in somewhere already on this blog, likely a post collecting previous rewatches. But I cannot find it. I suspect it may have been on a un-published post of rewatches, that I eventually deleted.
Anywayz, we start with a bunch of 50s kids collecting things to go into a Time Capsule, which will be opened in 50 years. Little Lucinda offers up her page of numbers, after acting weird all day. Yeah, just a sheet full of numbers. Later on, during the capsule entombment, she disappears, and is found in a basement closet having scratched her little nails off inscribing something on the inside of the door. "Please make them stop, make the whispering stop..." she intones.
Fifty years later little Caleb (Chandler Cantebury, The Host) gets the sheet when they open the capsule -- not sure what he was supposed to do with it, maybe do a class presentation or write an essay. Meanwhile his dad John (Nicolas Cage, Season of the Witch) is drinking and doing the single dad thing really badly. Both of them are still grieving for mom, who perished in a fire.... maybe a year ago? John is a lecturer at MIT and a bit intense; its Nick Cage after all.
While drinking heavily, as his son sleeps upstairs, John notices a very specific set of numbers on the sheet -- 9112001, and after them some digits that a bit of Googling shows is the number of people who died that day in NYC. John freaks. And then John starts finding other number sequences on the sheet. He transcribes it to his white board and spends the rest of the night circling dates, and numbers of deaths. There are other digits which he does not identify, but the dates he has circled are all definitely sequential, leading up to ... now. Well, now of 2009.
Meanwhile Caleb is seeing weird ass guys outside, pale men in long black coats. If you saw Proyas's 1998 movie Dark City you will be wigged out by those guys, but really who wouldn't.
John takes his wiggy 50-year-old-sheet-predicting-mass-deaths idea to his best friend Phil (Ben Mendelsohn, Andor), who works in astrophysics. He does not take John's idea very well. The meeting makes him late to pick up Caleb from school and that's when he notices his truck's GPS setting, realizing what the other numbers are -- location data. And the location for the next date on the sheet is... where he is at right now. John jumps out of his truck to see what the accident is ahead, assuming its about to be a disaster, and something worse happens. Right behind him, a plane crashes, scraping across the road before exploding in a field. Its a horrific scene or roaring engines, exploding fuel tanks and vast pools of flaming jet fuel. And people dying right in front of John's eyes.
The next day the news is all about atmospheric activity causing havoc in flight navigation systems and the ground of the all planes in the US.
Just the directorial tone is what sets this aside for me. There is now a palpable air of fear, not only in John but in Caleb seeing the men outside. Maybe its just the level of tension & anxiety that this viewing season, and currently real life, sets into my bones, but the movie moved from just the tense feeling I get from disaster flicks (because, even with them, you already expect mass death is coming) to an ever present sick feeling.
The next date, John tries to prevent. He sees the event is happening in NYC, so he calls it in anonymously. He is ignored, so he goes to the location, where there is the presence of authorities, but also crowds of people. They are there to catch a crank caller, possibly who is going to cause something to happen. John sees danger everywhere, chasing some of it down into the subway system, where... sparks fly, a train rail shorts and boom crunch, a subway train car is slamming through the platform wiping away lives. John is missed by the finest of hairs, as is the one woman & child he saves. Its a soul crushing scene of close up disaster.
There is one event left. Soon, but no "number of deaths". It just says "EE" which John sees as possibly Extinction Level Event. He's desperate and trying to trace down any idea of why and what is going on, maybe a hint of what he can do about it all. He tries to find the original writer of the sheet, and instead finds her daughter & granddaughter. Little Lucinda never really recovered and was obsessed with death, which is understandable. And then John realizes EE is "everyone else". News comes of a solar event coming, which John figures out moments before its announced, something that will burn off the atmosphere and sink solar radiation miles into the planet's crust --- killing everyone and everything. Planetary end. But what can John do? Why was his family presented this, if they cannot save anyone?
This is where the tone, and not untoward considering its Proyas, but probably why the movie got panned, the tone shifts from fearful supernatural horror & disaster to ... well, alien intervention. The scary guys in coats are aliens, who have been whispering to "chosen ones"; Caleb and Lucinda's granddaughter are such. They and other chosen ones will be taken off the planet, but... no one else. We end the movie with a wee bit of Close Encounters and then.... fire.
I still really like the movie, despite the reigned in Nick Cage craziness, maybe because of? Proyas does like his hope tinged darkness.
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