Better Late Then Never

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

(This review is in essence a spoiler, so if you have not seen it yet, don't read this.) This "documentary" is really a docudrama.Nostradamus did not see tomorrow, nor did the interpreters of his writings. There are countless books on his writings, and they differ in their interpretations of the future, sometimes even on past events. The docudrama is entertaining though, just as long as you suspend disbelief. What is said about the past that supposedly came true, was after those events came to pass. What is said of the future... well, you be the judge. When I first saw it, I was fresh out of high school. It made an impact on me. But it has been more than 35 years, and the predictions of the future as interpreted at the time of the movie was made, have not panned out. I don't remember anything that has come to pass as interpreted in the movie. I would watch again to see if I discover or remember anything of importance, but it would be a waste of time.

I guess my view of the prophecies of Michel de Nostradamus - the 16th century French prophet who is said to have written down accurate predictions of at least 2000 years of forthcoming human events – hold about as much weight as for me as something like The Da Vinci Code. There are a lot of holes in the Nostradamus' predictions so I tend to chalk it up as nothing more than an interesting curiosity.The documentary The Man Who Saw Tomorrow doesn't see it that way. Here is a movie that offers a tiny bit of biography about the supposed prophet, and then cobbles together footage from every source under the sun in an effort to prove his accuracy. Did he have fore-knowledge of the future? Did he accurately predict The French Revolution? Napoleon? The American Revolution? The Civil War? The rise of Hitler? World War II? The Atomic Bomb? The Kennedy Assassination? The Moon Landing? Is he also right in his prediction about World War III and the end of the world? Well, I don't happen to think so, but I am confused about whether the movie does. It spends 90 minutes reiterating that Nostradamus wrote down 2000 years worth of prophecies that came true and then adds a tag at the end to tell us that the producers of this film are actually less convinced of his accuracy than I am.Hosted by Orson Welles, who sits in his stuffy office behind a desk smoking a cigar, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow attempts to lay out all of the major turning points of history by way of Nostradamus' writing. Before diving head-long into his predictions, we learn that Nostradamus was a hard working student who had ambitions to be a doctor but after losing his family in the plague, turned his ambitions toward writing down his predictions in quatrains, hiding his verses in anagrams and secret code in an effort to avoid being prosecuted for witchcraft. Early on, we learn, he kissed the robes of a young Franciscan friar who would someday be Pope Sixtus V. Later he was invited to the home of a dignitary where he accurately predicted which pig they would be eating. Curiously, he forgot to jot those things down.The historical predictions put forth by Nostradamus are interesting, but the methods in which the movie presents them are, in a word, baffling. Nothing is off limits here. There is footage of the Kennedy assassination, the holocaust, The Moon Landing, the revolution in Iran. Then, for events where there is no footage, sometimes actors are used in recreations and other times we get footage from old movies like War and Peace. Sprinkled into the mix also are old newsreels, short films, documentary footage, illustrations and cheap special effects shots from old science fiction movies.The only center of logic in this chaotic jumble is a very brief interview with former astronaut Edgar Mitchell who argues that the future is nothing more than our summation of present events. I think I would have liked to have heard more from him and less from Jean Dixon, who appears absurdly satisfied that she predicted the deaths of both John and Bobby Kennedy. That's before Welles informs us that we can see Nostradamus' accuracy if we simply keep one eye on the quatrains and the other on our daily newspaper. For me, that's just too much work. I think I'll just let the future surprise me.The movie keeps insisting over and over that Nostadamus laid out a historical time line the revealed three men who would try to take over the world – Anti-Christs he called them. The first was Napoleon, the second was Hitler and the third is said to be a future tyrant who will come from the Middle East. This man, it is said, will plunge the world into a catastrophic war that will last 4 and 20 years, whatever that means.That prediction lays out the film's final act in which Nostradamus apparently predicted that a Middle Eastern Warrior in a blue turban would start World War III at or about May of 1988. That leads to an embarrassingly silly scene with cheap sets right out of "Battlestar Galactica", with the governments of both The Middle East and The United States firing nukes at each other until civilization is obliterated. After that, the movie helpfully reminds us that Nostradamus predicted a thousand years of peace before the world ends in 3797.The Man Who Saw Tomorrow is nothing more than a curiosity. Any attempt to take it seriously the requires the kinds of fruitless insights than are often attached to things like The Da Vinci Code, Roswell or Bigfoot. I'm no skeptic but I had to smile at most of this. It is a professionally made film that probably takes its subject more seriously than it should. I find the predictions of Nostradamus to be a curious but not essential element to human history. He seemed to have a good track record even if he did predict that Ted Kennedy would become President of the United States in 1984. Hey, nobody's perfect.

In my view, "The Man Who Saw Tomorrow" makes an even better argument than it intends to, due to things that have happened since the movie came out. Michel de Nostradamus prophetized that the people's princess would get killed in a moving metallic object. We just recently passed the 25th anniversary of Grace Kelly's death and the 10th anniversary of Princess Diana's death, both in car wrecks.But there's more. According to Nostradamus, the third Antichrist (the first two being Napoleon and Hitler) would rise to power in the Middle East during the period of about 1994-1999 and launch an attack on a great city near the 45th parallel, which narrator Orson Welles says would probably be New York. How true it all came, even if this is all a matter of interpretation.Overall, the movie leaves it up to us to decide whether or not we believe that Nostradamus was right. Although you gotta admit that they make a pretty convincing case. Welles, speaking in a no-nonsense tone and smoking a cigar, creates a rather eerie feeling...the kind of eerie that makes you truly respect the work that they must have done to put this movie together.So, I recommend this one. While some of Nostradamus's prophecies obviously didn't come true, it's truly scary how accurate others turned out to be. As for the third Antichrist - presumably Osama bin Laden - plunging the world into a massive war, the Bush family's business ties to the bin Laden family have certainly turned the world into a powder keg. As for the future, we'll just have to see how things turn out. Worth seeing.PS: this was the second time that Orson Welles narrated a movie. The previous one was the 1975 documentary "Bugs Bunny Superstar", a look at the early days of Termite Terrace, padded with nine classic cartoons.

I saw this "documentary" on HBO in the early '80s when I was an impressionable youth. It, too, scared the hell out of me. But then I grew up, and realized that though history DOES repeat itself; it's only because blind human nature and ignorance leaves the steering-wheel to chance all too often...and the side-show master, Mr. N, was intelligent enough to realize this. It's far easier to open your ass to prophesy than to assert your will.The fact that The History Channel deigned this hour of tripe as being worthy of airing astounds me. I would never imagine that a reputable outlet of education would broadcast this fantasy within a couple of months of the horrors of September 11, 2001. Perhaps the Jihadi have it right when they condemned us to death for being Godless (or is it Allahless?): we readily consume this freakish "entertainment" instead of respecting the sanctity of our dead. Hooray! I have something to pontificate about at the water-cooler on Monday! As if I had an education and some social bearing.Then we have other morons who will spout the quatrains as fact. Like that idiot reporter in NYC on the DAY of the 9/11 attacks; with the smoldering wreckage of the WTC in the background, he quoted the fiction of Mr. N. I imagine this ass-lick was attempting to improve his career. Congratulations! I hear Santa and the Easter Bunny are plotting Apocalypse too. Next time, try to respect the slaughtered before manufacturing drama. I suppose it was all `inevitable' though.right?If you have any respect in yourself, your fellow man, and free will; view this fiction for entertainment purposes only.And please, PLEASE, shun the ignorant. In your heart, you know what need be done.