A religious sci-fi experience? If there's such a thing, this was it.
It starts off somewhat modest, with a girl scribbling down a page full of numbers in class - soon to be stuffed into a time capsule along with everyone else's drawings, later found in a closet scribbling blood on the closet door. Time skips forth 50 years, and we're introduced to a single dad (John Koestler - Nicholas Cage) and his son Caleb, soon-to-be random (but is anything really random?) receiver of that one special numerical paper.
It turns out to be more than just numbers. It's a list of dates, locations and human lives lost in all major accidents on the planet the past 50 years, and three that have yet to happen. Nicholas cage, who just so happens to be a teacher in some kind of science/math/something (?), uncovers this truth, speaks to a colleague who of course thinks he's crazy, tries to meet up with the daughter of the mom who originally wrote those numbers, and shortly thereafter their children end up the new Adam & Eve, taken to an interplanetary Eden on a bunch of spaceships steered by aliens and/or angels, where they're left to procreate in peace, build up a new world and quickly forget about their former families. And they're not even of age yet.
The final sequence of destruction is incredibly pompous, solar radiation sweeping over the planet as if it's nothing more than a summer breeze, and the moments before it are pretty eerie. It gets especially eerie when Caleb himself starts scribbling down a sheet of numbers, which in retrospect makes zero sense because all of humankind was shortly to be annihilated anyway, and they along with it, and John never did get a chance to put that paper in a time capsule like I thought he would, so what use was it all anyway?
It ends religiously, and although such unveiled religious motives always throw me off guard a bit (I'll admit I've prejudice), the way they throw in sci-fi along with the Godly phenomenons make it a much more biased experience. The fact that Caleb and Abby seemed to be swooped away on an actual spaceship while everyone else partakes in the Earthly inferno somewhat disapproves of the Buddhist theory that there's life after life... but what did you expect? It was an inspiring watch regardless. Coincidentally, the intro reminds a lot of the new 'Left Behind' intro. Very similar typography. I wonder if there's a connection...
rated 4/5: fo shizzle