Dream Theatre

Ginza sale season

Marunouchi new building

Maru

A scene in The Maru, this cool bar in Hachobori.

Knowing

Nicholas cage movies in recent years have either fallen into two camps; unwatchable or dire. Anyone who's had the misfortune to watch Ghost Rider or Bangkok Dangerous will understand what I'm talking about. So why did I force myself to sit through another potential Cage crapfest? Well the trailer and premise held an awful lot of promise. Furthermore it was exploring an idea that I've been toiling away over for the last year or so - what if you had been given the gift or curse of clairvoyance?

The premise is simple, fifty years earlier a school in the Boston area decide to bury a time capsule filled with the drawings by the children of the day. One girl however submits a page of seemingly random numbers. Fifty years later and Cage's son is the lucky recipient of this curious work of modern art.
Cage being a professor of astrophysics at MIT enables him to quickly works out that the numbers are in fact dates, times, death tolls, and GPS co-ordinates for major disasters over the last fifty years.

 Well, armed with such incredible knowledge you'd have thought Cage would have stayed well away from the unlucky locations, well he doesn't, he wants to find out if they are real. It's no spoiler to say that they are, the thing is something else is coming which is much worse than any airplane disaster or subway accident.

 The film is over long and slow in it's first two acts, and could have been easily dismissed as another turkey if it wasn't for a surprisingly well executed third act that actually doesn't drop the ball, delivering a remarkably well realized climax that is both cinematic and thought provoking.

Incidentally I wrote this on my Iphone Typepad application, then edited later on the IMac.