Knowing

Well, this is not an environmentalist movie and the man is at fault. That is the good thing. A giant and intense solar flare is random and not any thing we can prevent or doing anything about it. The surface matter on earth would just change to another form.

Nicolas Cage makes up for his previous Bangkok assassin movie which was a smorgasborg of so many other movies of the same element. His name is John in this movie. He is set apart from the pretty Rose Byrne and she is taken from us before any love making or kissing. I do not miss that but I was upset when she died. Ofcourse she was going to die soon any how. If some people could have made it to the bottom of Carlsbad caverns in New Mexico or the Big Cave in Kentucky, perhaps they could have survived this horrendous natural onslaught. I have been to the giant Caverns in New Mexico but not to the deep hole in the ground in Kentucky.

This movie is very similiar to The Mothman Prophecies. Both are solid but this movie's budget was a little greater.

This movie was entertaining, intriguing, and disturbing right from the beginning. The movie begins in quaint little 1959 as an elementary school class is preparing to put documents into a time capsule. It would be given to the same grade 50 years later, in the fall of the genesiacal school year. The class is supposed to draw a picture, one girl is writing down a bunch of mysterious numbers. It is put in the envelopes intended for the time capsule. This same girl is later missing but found down in the basement closet of the school using her bleeding fingers to carve numbers into the woodent door. She has some sort of clairvoyance it seems.

John is a professor at MIT in astro physics or some related science. His is in the class in the 9th grade, and receives the strange envelope with numbers all over it. John sees this letter and begins playing the numbers. He finds out these numbers are dates for tragic events and the numbers written down adjacent to them are the exact deaths attributed to that horrendous happening. Sept. 11th is the date that caught his notice.

There are many other dates on the page that he can not explain and either can a colleague. It is later revealed these numbers are latitude and longitutinal coordinates that match up with the natural or human caused calamity.

The movie has a little religion tossed in. It is mixed with the supernatural.

The movie turns frightening when they realize that the final two characters which are EE stand for everyone else.

Knowing is the title but after watching the movie I remain ignorant and guessing. I wish I knew more. John's son is apparently chosen by some strange force. When John confronts one of them after chasing them down, he is repelled by a screaming voice from one of the forces. It is reminiscent of Julianne Moore's movie The Forgotten when she confronted the alien who took her child. The movie or John's son refers to these people as the whisperers. They whisper in his head and it seems they have been for a while. But it intensifies after the boy receives the letter filled with the numbers.

The adorable Rose Byrne's character is Diana and she has a daughter who seems to be having some strange episodes herself. Diana is the daughter of the original character, the small child writing down all of the numbers in 1959. This was a strange girl and how or why she procreated is never explained. She told her daughter-Diana when she was going to die. What sort of mother does this? Diana's mother and father are dead in the present day but I forgot how. Diana makes a rash decision at the end to run or drive crazily to some caves where she believes she will be safe, this is unwise. John was not acting any more strange at the crazed moment than he has many times before. But I guess he could have explained more to her.

OK, who were the whisperers. The Others in the show Lost have the ability to whisper on that island and that tremendous show has not explained this thus far. The Whispers have the same ability. And they have their chosen few as well. They have a space ship that is shaped like giant crystals, so perhaps they are from Superman's planet-Krypton. On earth, they choose to drive cars for transportation like everyone else. Evidently, it is shown at the end that they have many humans to escort away from this death course. The Earth would not ready to produce or sustain life for another couple million years when our atmosphere has time to rebound. They drop off the boy and girl and other "lucky" humans on another planet deep into space, in another solar system. The boy and girl are chosen to procreate and spread the human seed around another planet. The aliens were not kind enough to bring the children an iPod. The final scene is the children frolicking on some open grassy fields with a gorgeous tree consuming the screen. The tree of life? It did not seem to the apple tree God warns Adam and Eve about since it is the only tree in the land scape. Not a lot of choices.

Knowing had some discussion about determinism and randomness in the beginning. But it seemed the learning stopped there. The storyline did not thankfully. It was riveting and I believe the ending was better than the Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I never did care for the last half of the movie, the first half was tremendous. Sort of like Die Hard IV.

The musical score matched the intensity. There were some pretty faces in the movie. Cage has tossed another winner onto his long list of successful films. He still has to do a few more to compensate for the Wicker Man debacle. That was the worst film of this fresh century.

The drawback is that there was not a lot of solid or memorable one liners. Not even close the outstanding written script of The Departed. DiCaprio had more good lines in one scene than this entire 2 hour show. What am I supposed to take from this project? Our life giving sun could destroy us? There are alien watchers paying close attention to us and they can predict the future? Well, they were shown to have wings when boarding the ship at the end. In the picture, in Diana's mother's home, the devil was on the right, on the picture. With multiple faces like Dante wrote about. I do not think aliens could predict the future. So they were angels at the end. But why would they steal the children from the mother like that? Therefore, that is my hefty and substantial jab from me to this movie. A long with the weak writing at times.

I just hope the sun does not take us down like that. Give us another 200 years at least, and the sun is about to thrust some massive amount of energy our way, we can fly a lot of the population off this planet. Atleast the ones that deserve to leave. I am not saying that is me, but not any violent criminals or any descendants of Barbara Boxer or Nanci Pilosi.

I allocate this movie three stars.***