knowing-posterInconsistent.  Disjointed.  Intriguing.  Overlong.  That’s the best way I can describe the Alex Proyas directed/Nicolas Cage headliner Knowing.  It has it’s flaws, that it almost completely overcomes, and is full of mysterious charm.

In 1959, an elementary school buries a time capsule to be opened fifty years in the future.  The children draw pictures of what they think the world of 2009 will look like to go into the capsule.  The children draw pictures of spaceships, robots, and everything else their sci-fi minded minds can dream up.  It’s all very 1950′s.

All the children draw kitsch except for troubled little Lucinda Embry.  Lucinda hears voices whispering feverishly into her ears.  The voices whisper bad things.  Little Lucinda doesn’t draw any pictures, she fills her paper to overflowing with numbers.

Fifty years later, the elementary school unearths the time capsule and gives each current student an envelope from it.  Caleb Koestler, who is a little different than most of his classmates, receives the envelope containing Luncinda’s page of numbers.  He thinks it’s interesting and keeps it.  He also doesn’t know that the whispered voices Lucinda heard are the same ones he himself hears.

Caleb’s father, John Koestler, is a professor at MIT, and is still struggling over the death of his wife.  During a drunken binge, John discovers Lucinda’s numbers aren’t random gibberish, they are actually a series of dates and coordinates that document tragedies of the last half century.  Some of the dates are prophesies yet to be fulfilled.


John is then thrust into the task of trying to make sense of it all.  He tries to convince others of what is happening, and he tries to stop the tragedies yet to come.  In the process he discovers mysterious strangers are stalking him and his son, and he learns that the late Lucinda’s daughter and grandaughter are suffering through much the same things as he and Caleb.

Knowing has an atmosphere of mystery that saves it from collapse.  The movie is stylistically disjointed.  And Nicolas Cage gives an uneven performance that took me out of the movie a couple of times, but he does what he can when he is saddled with some of Knowing‘s weaker moments.  Parts of it feel cobbled together from other movies.

It falls somewhere between the War of the Worlds remake and Signs.  It’s good, but if you can get past the lip service and polish it’s easy to see it could have been classic.

3.5 out of 5
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