Nostradamus 1999

The next time you feel overwhelmed by apocalypse hysteria coming at you over the media, rent this film and sit back and have a good laugh--this film forcasts massive worldwide earthquakes in 1988, world war by 1994 (27 years of it!), apocalypse by 1999, blah, blah, blah....This is a magnificent illustration of how selling doom works as business, and having these predictions to watch from the comfort of the late '90s is a marvelous tonic against wild claims made by all manner of 'experts.' Have some high-cholesterol popcorn (with lots of salt), fire up the ozone-depleting air-conditioning, and let this film fill you in on how the world ended! Enjoy!

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.

I think its important to note that when you make literally thousands of predictions, some of them will certainly occur. That said, every prediction Nostradamus made is open to numerous and varied interpretations. As we move toward whatever future may be for us, there will always be those who will see something in a quatrain that strikes them as similar enough to think, "AHA! He got it right!". When you watch this movie, keep in mind that several of the more popular quatrains have been applied to multiple events at various times through history, always with the "AHA!" moment in the minds of the interpreters. There have understandably been those people who, acting in their own devious interests, have manufactured events specifically to resemble predictions, knowing that men who believe events will unfold a certain way, will work to ensure they do, even to their own detriment. Keep in mind, Nostradamus' own disclaimer: "the One who is reasonable can learn from my prophecies how to find the right path to take as if he would have found footprints in the sand from someone who has gone before." The future IS ours to choose. Our future may be predetermined, but its predetermined by our choices each day.

I remember this being on Cinemax all the time back in the early 80s, I taped it, and when I was in high school, I mentioned it to a teacher, and she had me bring it in and the class watched it, and then the school library borrowed it and made a copy. I wonder if they still have it, they should be ashamed of themselves if they show it to any more classes, I was just a teenager, but these were educated adults taking this nonsense seriously. I saw it again recently, I remember being absolutely mesmerized by it at the time, I'm almost embarrassed that I was ever naive enough to take this for anything more than base entertainment. The whole production is just so cheap and silly looking, and most of the predictions haven't panned out, I'm sure Nostrodamus was a slick talking con man of his time, sort of like Sylvia Brown now, just say a lot of vague things and hope people overlook it when your wrong. All of that being said, Orson Wells has a great presence, and he almost makes this tripe seem plausible, if you close your eyes. If you saw it way back when, it's kind of fun to revisit it and goof on it, but you've never seen it, there's no need to.

This movie and I have a very interesting history. I first heard of Nostradomus when I watched an "In Search Of.." special on his life and times. They said he predicted King Henry's death in a jousting tournament and all kinds of other things. I remember watching this film in the 1980s and it scared me to death, especially the part in the end about the third Anti-Christ, the evil Warlord in a blue turban who will start WWIII. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, I read an article that said he was the third anti-Christ and it scared me even more. I served in Desert Storm with the National Guard and I can remember all the time I was over there I thought the world was going to end just like it showed in this ridiculous film, I about drove myself crazy worrying over nothing! My father always used to tell me that I was foolish even thinking about Nostrodomus. Well anyway, I read a book on this prophet by a man named James Randi and he pointed out that Nostrodomus was really a fraud. His predictions are so vague that they can be twisted and turned to mean almost anything. All right, he talks about something called Hister in his predictions, in this movie they try to make it out like he predicted the rise of Adolf Hitler. But if you do a little bit of studying, you find Hister was the name of a river in France! Friends there is nothing to worry about! In the wake of these terrorist attacks, people have tried to make it out like he predicted those as well. Dont make the mistake I did, its not even worth thinking about. Orson Welles has a great narrator's voice and makes the story come alive, but just watch it and laugh. Looking back, I feel so foolish that I let this film frighten me so much, I should have listened to my father.