Sign (film)

1959 When celebrating the opening of the elementary school of William Daws, all students should draw their vision of the future, after which the drawings will be hidden in the Time Capsule for the next 50 years. A girl named Lucinda Embry is not allowed to finish her drawing, which is a chaotic set of numbers from 0 to 9, and she disappears from the festive ceremony. Later, the teacher finds her in the gym closet, scribbling the remaining numbers on the wooden door and imploring her to "stop whispering."

2009 (our days). The container with the pictures is removed to the surface, and the sheet with the numbers falls into the hands of the boy Caleb, the son of astrophysicist and MIT professor John Koestler. Considering first a picture of Lucinda as a meaningless set of numbers, John accidentally discovers that the numbers accurately indicate the dates, the number of victims and the coordinates of various man-made disasters that have occurred over the past 50 years. In one of these catastrophes (a fire in the hotel), John’s wife died, and he decides that Lucinda’s message fell into the hands of his son for a reason.

The leaflet also has three future dates, and yet another catastrophe — the crash of flight 074 Plymouth Air and the death of 81 people — occurs in front of John. Meanwhile, mysterious silent people from far away are watching Caleb and show him a vision of the coming forest fire . John tries to talk to Diana, Lucinda’s daughter, to get more information, but she refuses to talk to him at first. Then John tries to prevent the next predicted catastrophe in New York , but does not have time. Because of the short circuit and switch hands, one metro train leaves the rails, takes off onto the platform and crashes into the second train. The head car slides along the platform, crushing people. Total killed 178 people.

Diana and her daughter Abby come to John, and they go to the abandoned house of Lucinda, where they find newspaper clippings on the wall about some of the catastrophes that have taken place and a picture of Ezekiel , who knelt before God against the background of the burning Sun. John finds the repeating words “Everyone Else” (“BB - Everything Around”) and understands that after the date of the last catastrophe there is not the number “33”, but the inverted letters “EE”, that is, the catastrophe will be global .

While John and Diana are inside the house, a car with Caleb and Abby is surrounded by four silent unknowns, but they leave as soon as John comes to the rescue. Later, Caleb begins to write the numbers exactly as Lucinda did, not realizing what he was doing, and Abby admits that they constantly hear the whispers of strangers.

Taking into account the increased activity of the Sun recently and on the basis of his own scientific work, John concludes that the upcoming macro flash of the sun will burn the whole Earth. John picks up the door of the closet from which Lucinda was hiding from school, finds the last figures written to her, which are the coordinates of Lucinda’s house, and believes that this is the only place where they can escape.

Meanwhile, Diana is leaving with the children, intending to take refuge in a network of underground caves. At the gas station, two of the mysterious silent strangers are stealing a car with Caleb and Abby. Diana tries to catch up with them and dies in an accident at an intersection at exactly midnight, on the very day Lucinda predicted to her.

Arriving at Lucinda’s mobile home, John finds the children safe and sound in company with “whispering” (as the children call silent strangers communicating with the children through a mental whisper). The "whispers" turn out to be aliens, humanoids in human shells, resembling angels who are going to save Caleb and Abby so that they "start all over again." John is not allowed to go with the children. At first, Caleb refuses to go without a father, but John convinces him, promising that they will end up together. The group of "whispers" together with Caleb and Abby leave Earth on their spacecraft, a huge device that looks like a rotating wheel from a picture about Ezekiel, as well as a few dozen other ships from different ends of the planet.

While riots break out in Boston , John comes to his family's home to be with his loved ones in the last moments of human life. Solar macro flash burns all life on the planet.

In the final scene, Caleb and Abby disembark on a new planet resembling Earth , along with passengers from other ships. At the end of the film, Caleb and Abby, dressed in white clothes, run to a huge tree resembling the Tree of Life .

• Nicolas Cage - John Koestler
• Rose Byrne - Diana Weiland / Lucinda Embry (photos in Lucinda’s house and newspaper article)
• Chandler Canterbury - Caleb Koestler
• Lara Robinson - Lucinda Embry / Abby Weiland / Diana as a Child (Photographs in Lucinda's House)
• DJ Maloney - Stranger
• Ben Mendelsohn - Phil Beckman, Koestler's friend
• Adrienne Pickering - Alison
• Nadia Townsend - Grace Koestler

The script was written by writer Ryan Pearson , after which Columbia Pictures took the project for herself. Rod Luri and Richard Kelly were appointed to the place of the director, but later the rights to the film were sold. The project was picked up by the film company Escape Artists, and Stiles White and Juliet Snowden rewrote the script. In February 2005, Alex Proyas was appointed to the post of director of the film. Questions of financing and distribution of the film took on Summit Entertainment. Proyas and screenwriter Stuart Hazeldine conducted a new casting, which began on March 25, 2008 in Melbourne, Australia. The director planned to mix “realism with fantastic blotches”, taking the movie “ Exorcist ” as the landmark. ^[2]

The film takes place in Boston , and the film crew used Australian places like Geelong Ring Road, the Melbourne Museum , Mount Macedon and Collins Street to recreate this city. ^[3] The film was also shot at Camberwell High School ( English Eng. Camberwell High School ), converted for the film to William Dawes Elementary School in Boston ( Eng. William Dawes Elementary ) ^[4] . The Australian Synchrotron ^[5] and the Haystack Observatory in Westford , Massachusetts were used for surveys inside the observatory.

• The plot of the film is somewhat similar to the plot of Arthur Clarke’s “ Rescue Squad ”. In both cases, the death of the planet is the result of solar activity. In both cases, earthlings are rescued by aliens from other planets. However, if in the film the aliens take away the chosen children from the doomed planet, then in the story of Clark the earthlings themselves set off for the stars, plunging the entire population into ships of a huge armada.
• In Lucinda’s drawing and on the Internet, John Koestler finds the following man-made disasters:

1. The death of the group of Igor Dyatlov - February 1, 1959, 9 dead.
2. The crash of Argonaut P-4 in Stockport - June 4, 1967, 72 dead.
3. The crash of flight 981 Turkish Airlines - March 3, 1974, 346 dead.
4. The earthquake in Mexico City - September 19, 1985, 10 153 dead.
5. The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant - April 26, 1986, 4056 dead.
6. Explosion of Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie - December 21, 1988, 270 dead.
7. Kobe earthquake - January 17, 1995, 6434 dead.
8. Oklahoma City attack on April 19, 1995, 168 dead.
9. The explosion of the US Embassy in Nairobi - 213 dead (date is incorrect - the attack occurred on August 7, 1998, and in the movie on August 8, 1997).
10. The attacks of September 11, 2001 - 2996 dead.
11. The attacks in Bali - October 12, 2002, 187 dead.
12. Earthquake in the Indian Ocean - December 26, 2004, 229,866 dead.
13. Hurricane Katrina - August 29, 2005, 1577 dead.

• The following man-made disasters are mentioned on newspaper clippings in the abandoned house of Lucinda:

1. The fire on the aircraft carrier "Forrestal" - July 29, 1967, 134 dead.
2. The clash of two Boeing 747s on Tenerife - March 27, 1977, 583 dead.
3. Clash of Boeing 727 and Cessna 172 over San Diego - September 25, 1978, 144 dead.
4. The crash of Flight 901 Air New Zealand - November 28, 1979, 257 dead.
5. The eruption of the volcano St. Helens - May 18, 1980, 57 dead.

• The plane crashing in front of Koestler - Airbus A320 non-existent airline PLYMOUTH AIR with the board number EC-VJL.
• At the 36th minute of the movie in a news release that John Koestler watches, an explosion of an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico is reported. There is a case of monstrous foresight - a similar catastrophe (up to a place) occurred in 2010 .
• The end of the world in the film took place on October 19 (2009), as well as in Ray Bradbury ’s short story “ Tomorrow's End of the World ” (October 19, 1969).

• " The Sign (English) on the Internet Movie Database
• Sign (English) on the site allmovie  
• "The Sign" - the official site of the film