Knowing is not very good.

Rating: 3/10 (11 July 2009)

The first 20 minutes of this film are commendable. There is no time wasted on unnecessary dialogue, and as much as I hate Nicholas Cage and his performance, I still think that the beginning of the film showed promise. As we watch the little girl Lucinda fervently scribble this ominous sequence of numbers, we sit there, knowing (no pun intended) that they hold significance. But precisely what...and more interestingly, why? Fast forward to fifty years later, and we meet an emaciated looking Cage; an MIT astrophysics professor who had lost his wife in a fire and now lives alone with his son. They are obviously both lonely. Cage drinks to forget his past, and his son watches home videos of his mother to help him sleep at night, but neither can find complete solace in their methods. Cage feels he is not yet ready to move on from his loss and meet another woman. In moments of depravity he often forgets to pick his son up from school. In this particular instance at the beginning of the film, he arrives to his son's school late. Today, they are opening up the time capsule from 50 years ago, and Cage's son Caleb happens to get Lucindas number page, his earpiece ringing and clicking as he takes the envelope from the teacher. That is where things start to go downhill. Cage discovers and "decodes" the sequence that very night, maybe two hours after his son brings it home. Too fast for my liking, which means the other hour and a half of the film will be spent on extra "filler" ; new plot devices and characters. Agh...they had a good thing going. Case and point; the aliens, and Lucinda's daughter, and Cage's sister, and the black stones, and etc. The film does not delve into why Lucinda knew the numbers, why it was Cage who discovered them, and if these things are in fact inevitable and sequential (as Cage explains in one of his seminars), or changeable. Is Cage enabling these events or preventing them through his intervention? Well, we never find out. Instead, they show us aliens. Bravo, really.
If you want to see a film with the same idea, watch Signs, which is so much better I cannot even begin to understand why it has such a low rating on this site, nevertheless why Knowing has such a high one. Far more crafty and well acted, Signs has all the elements this film has and more, without all that clutter and silly spectacle.