Movie Review: Knowing

I've always liked end of the world disaster movies, like The Day After Tomorrow and Deep Impact. There is something a little satisfying in seeing the reaction of the masses to some implausible but potential scenarios of global doom. But Knowing takes this concept one step further; what if you knew in advance about the end of the world?

Starring Nicholas Cage as a widowed and less than believable astrophysics professor. Spoilers are provided below, so if you haven't seen the movie, do yourself a favour and wait before reading the rest.

During the historic opening of a time capsule placed at his son's high school, students unseal letters written by students from fifty years ago. Cage's son receives a strange letter covered in numbers, without any obvious sense. Piqued by a curious encounter with a mysterious being and strange whispering, the son brings the letter home. That night, after confronting his son concerning the theft of the letter, which Cage considers school property, and during one of his nightly drinking bouts as he slips into a depressive state due to the death of his wife, Cage discovers within the letter a sequence of numbers that corresponds to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. More importantly, a number following the date corresponds exactly to the number of victims.

Furious research through the night allow Cage to discover that the letter is a complete list of all of the major disasters of the last fifty years, in perfect sequential order. But is it a coincidence? As one of his colleagues points out, there are also sequences of numbers between each set of dates that are unaccounted for, which could indicate that Cage is simply finding meaning in random numbers. And the odd ending of the letter, which provides a date and the number 33 do not really correspond to anything. Since there are three sets of dates that indicate future events, Cage proceeds to investigate and eventually attempt to stop the disasters that indicated by the dates and numbers of victims, and what we eventually discover are the exact coordinates for each happening. We also learn that the little girl who had written the letter fifty years ago had locked herself in a closet in the school and scratched something else into the door. After meeting with the daughter of the letter writer, Cage discovers that the 33 are actually upside down letter E, and that EE stands for Everyone Else and we finally understand that the final catastrophe will be global in scale and will mean the end of humanity. Being an astrophysics professor, Cage quickly determines that an unusually strong solar flare will destroy all life on Earth.

The mysterious stranger has now multiplied and we begin to realize that they are not from this world, and that they are here for a purpose. This is when the movie begins to take a turn for the worst as we quickly learn that the Strangers are here to save some humans, specifically certain children, including Cage's son and the daughter of the daughter of the original letter writer. All along, the Strangers had sent messages, warnings if you like, to allow the descendants of some chosen people to survive the next fifty years in order to be "picked up" just before the impending disaster.

The story ends, and we witness the destruction of the Earth but not before watching the alien spaceship lift off from the surface, and from our bird's eye perspective, we see that several ships are leaving the surface of the planet in the same way. Moments later, these ships quickly "warp" away from Earth's orbit and the flare hits the planet, eradicating everything on the planet's surface. The children are dropped in a field of bulbous, wheat-like plains, where they immediately begin to walk towards a lone white tree, as we see other alien ships in the distance, we assume dropping their "cargo" in the same manner.

The movie was an enjoyable visual experience, and although the story has some elements of drama, the story telling was simply not up to par with the possibilities that this story held. Cage provided adequate acting skills, but his role did not really allow him to display anything other than utter depression, or utter terror at the impending doom! It's worth watching at least once, but that's about it.