We watched Knowing last night.  It had so much potential with Nicholas Cage and riding piggy back on his National Treasure movies.  They should have known better.  Heck, even Nicholas Cage should have known this movie was going to be a stinker.  It’s set up in the beginning with so much potential.  It’s 1959 and a school buries a time capsule to be opened 50 years from now.  Each kid is asked to draw a picture of what they think the future will be like.  The drawings are sealed in envelopes and put in the capsule. One troubled young girl who is hearing voices fills a page with a series of numbers.  Fast forward 50 years later and meet Nicholas Cage.  He’s a science teacher who lost his wife in a tragic fire and he’s questioning the mysteries of the universe.  How did we get here?  Was it all random?  Was it divine?  Was it science?  Do we have a purpose?

Warning: Spoilers ahead.  Don’t read unless you want to know!

His son, who is partially deaf, goes to the school where the time capsule is buried.  It’s 2009 and they are about to dig it up.  And you guessed it!  The son gets the envelope of numbers.  He’s very disappointed in it, but his father (Nicholas Cage) picks it up that night and starts to decode the numbers.  He discovers it’s a series of dates on which horrible events happened, followed by the number of people who died in the tragedy.  For instance, the first one he discovers is 0911012556 which is 09/11/01 – 2556 people died that day.  He ends up decoding 50 horrible events that spanned the globe, followed by 3 events that have yet to happen.  The only problem is there are a bunch of numbers in between each date and death toll that he can’t explain yet.

So one day he’s late getting to school to pick his son up and he’s stuck in traffic.  It’s the day that according to the numbers, the next event will occur. He looks down at his GPS and discovers the series of numbers next to the date are the longitude/lattitude coordinates. He’s stuck in traffic right where the next event is going to happen, and supposedly 81 people are about to die.  What follows is an amazing special effects scene that will knock your socks off!  It was indeed quite scary.  I won’t spoil that for you.

So poor Nicholas Cage tries to tip off police as to where the next event is going to happen.  There’s rumors of a terrorist attack.  Instead, he ends up going to the place on the next date and is involved in a horrible Subway accident that again is very creepy and intense.

Obviously, Nicholas wants to meet the woman who wrote the numbers down 50 years ago, but discovers she has died.  He locates her daughter instead and approaches her and tells her about the numbers.  She thinks he’s crazy at first until the Subway accident happens. After that, she tells him all about her crazy mom and takes him to where she lived where there are all these newspaper clippings on the wall of the events that have taken place.  The final date is 10/19/09 followed by a backwards EE.  They soon discover it stands for Everyone Else.  The daughters tells Nicholas that her mom used to always tell her she was going to die on that date.  So, Nicholas assumes it means it’s going to be the end of the world.

Now, here’s the nuances where the movie went totally sour.  As soon as Nicholas’s son is handed the envelope, he starts seeing people in the woods dressed in dark clothes and he starts hearing whispers.  A car pulls up at his house one day and someone inside hands the boy a black stone.  And suddenly, Nicholas and the boy are finding the black stones everywhere.  Remember, I told you the boy was partially deaf?  Well, his hearing aid is blamed for the voices in his head so he takes it off.  He communicates some with Nicholas in sign language, but they can still talk to one another, and the boy talks and hears just fine.  Huh? Wha?  We are told half way through the movie that he is only partially deaf.  Oh, okay.  Then why be deaf at all in the movie?  Just so he can blame the voices on his hearing aid?

We later discover the strange people we keep seeing everywhere are aliens sent to Earth to gather children and send them to another planet because it is indeed about to be the end of the world. And when the Emergency Broadcasting Alert goes off, all hell breaks loose.  And did I mention that the music in the background in this movie is absolutely over-the-top horrible?!  I couldn’t believe some of the crap they played.  It was like 1930s black and white horror films!

So, the end of the world is coming, whether Nicholas Cage likes it or not.  Ummm….there’s no way he can really fight that.  He sees his boy off on the alien spaceship and finds out he can’t go with him.  Solar flares destory mankind, including Nicholas Cage, while some nice classical music plays and we’re left with an image of the children being dropped off on another planet. No joke.

The End.

I might also add this could very well be the end of Nicholas Cage’s career.  If City of Angels didn’t do it, I know Knowing probably will.

Despite all of the flaws this movie had, Hollywood can’t really go after “the end of the world” theme unless you send some astronauts up in space to blow the meteor out of the way or to fix the sun or to do something else in an hour and thirty minutes to save the day.  We always save the day.  We love a happy ending, and if we don’t get a happy ending and we’re all gonna die, the last thing I want to hear is some nice classical music.

The premise behind the movie and the end of the world is indeed something scary to think about, but it could happen and there’s nothing us or Nicholas Cage can do about it.  We know that.  And I’m sorry for anyone who paid good money to see this movie in the theater.  Wish you’d known better.