I get why the girl at the beginning of the movie was off on a mission when she was scribbling on the paper then scratching the inside of the door. But why was Caleb doing the same thing towards the end of the movie? The entire planet was about to be tourched and he was scribbling away like the girl at the start of the movie. A little pointless I thought.
sharebump
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Yeah I thought the exact same thing, wondered why he would do that if the world is ending. Only thing I can figure is that maybe those are the dates/locations of disasters on the new planet? Far fetched and with some holes I know (no lat/long lines set up yet), but the whole movie is like that, why shouldn't it apply to this scene?
Or, more likely, in case a sequel ever got greenlit...
"Ugh, now i'm going to have to go online and look at turtles." - Michael Scott
because it was "determined" that he would do that, so that his father could connect the dots about finding the location from the door that Lucinda had carved. In the end though, the angels/aliens take them their anyways, so maybe it was a moot point...
shareI agree. I think that the plan was for his father to figure out the numbers and eventually take both kids (and the mother) to the spaceship landing site, but a couple of things got in the way - first the teacher stopping young Lucinda from finishing the last few numbers so that she wound up scratching out the numbers in the school closet (the coordinates of the site where the mobile home was. Lucinda knew the numbers and later in life figured it out and set up her mobile home there, and would have been waiting for them had she not died. Having Caleb write the numbers out again was maybe an attempt to get those final coordinates to Caleb and his father (and also as a result, Abby and her mother) so that they could all make it the site on their own. Don't have a reason for why he had to write so many of the numbers rather than skip ahead to the important ones (aside from building tension and allowing for the father to interrupt the writing and make the connection to the scratches in the desk to the scratches in the school closet. Also, it would have been easier for the aliens to just make Caleb write the coordinates out rather than having to go through all that).
The other thing that got in the way of getting those coordinates to them was Abby's mother wanting to go the caves. If she hadn't freaked out about that before he had a chance to figure out the coordinates, they would have all gone to the coordinates of the landing site and been fine. I think that since she was about to take off with the kids and bring them to the caves, the aliens had to intervene and drive the kids there.
I enjoyed the movie in the moment, but thinking about it afterwards leads me to question a lot about it. Maybe the aliens have a different sense of time passing, but 50 years ahead of time seems unnecessarily early to start this whole process in motion if they have the ability to whisper directly into kids' minds.
It suggests that people in history (when there was writings and drawings, so that they could make that angel drawing) have seen them before and called them angels, and the movie suggests that they were responsible for the original "Adam" and "Eve" beginning of the human species. They use the phrase "the chosen ones" which seems to imply that they were responsible for Jesus too. If they have the power to resurrect people, why weren't they exercising that in this time?
The order of the numbers was "date", "how many" followed by "where" ??? - longitude and latitude.
Now, we have to think spatially as well as logically.
"Where" also applies to ? - where you would need to be to witness any of the events.
no one knew "where" for the last event unless they finished the list.
For "our" two little ones the location for "where" was ? - at the school on the door under the paint.
This gave the father the location of the last event. And it was where they had to be to "witness" it.
say no more.
Other examples :
- Close Encounters of The Third kind. There was the "mountain image" and there was the "song" and there was the unrelenting compulsion to walk to where you felt you had to walk "Zee pZychic connection". And the sense of urgency kept up right until the final arrival.
- Saving Private Ryan - we shoot the wounded runners until they are dead, because as long as they breath they still carry the message.
- 2010 - Hal is instructed by David Bowman to repeat the message for as long as he can.
Who knows. I like the way Cage stopped him from writing them, even though he knew the previous number list had been proved not only correct, but also incomplete.
"No time for writing numbers son, not when there's coordinates missing."