Great & Profound Sci-Fi

Rating: 10/10 (11 March 2013)

This is such an excellent movie that I cannot help but wonder if these negative reviews are part of a deliberate campaign to bury this movie. Or the public has become so incredibly stupid that they cannot understand a truly profound film.
There are spoilers ahead:
"Knowing" is a mystery thriller that results in the literal end of the world, in a way that might actually happen some day . A strange, morbid little girl deposits a slip of paper with dozens of lines of numbers on it, into her school's time capsule. When the capsule is opened 50 years later, Cage's son gets her envelope and Cage, an MIT scientist who has recently lost his wife, becomes fascinated by this series of numbers. He has revealed up to this point that he believes life is random, without meaning or purpose. As most people would however, he instinctively tries to find a pattern or purpose to the numbers -what did this girl mean? His attention is drawn to a series of figures that he realizes represents 9/11. He then comes to understand that part of the number string represents significant dates with mass deaths. This leads to his eventual discovery that some people CAN indeed foretell the future, horrifyingly so, but that even such knowledge, doesn't mean we can prevent it! The point of the movie ultimately is that there is both purpose and meaning in life but much of life is pre-determined. That is a philosophical issue that Cage assigns his class to ponder in their term paper - determinism vs randomness, which reflects the despair in his own mind after losing his wife.
Many of the "plot holes" really aren't. Viewers didn't understand or missed, parts of the movie. For example:
1. Picking only these "white" children. This is not true at all. Cage's boy at the end says that the aliens can only take those "who have heard the call". This could be children...or adults (as the original girl Lucinda continued to hear the call as an adult but killed herself in despair instead of waiting). We just don't see who else might have been saved as the story focuses on Cage and these two children. We DO see that there are MANY ships leaving Earth that could have BOTH children and adults who have "heard the call".
These could be of ALL racial and ethnic backgrounds as they are leaving different places on Earth, and there could also be adults to raise the children on the new Earth (or the aliens might have done this).
2. The aliens not being able to communicate or looking like Billy Idol clones. They had to adopt a relatively "acceptable" human disguise and they came up with the 80's punk look. No matter what they picked it would have been dated at some point and the filmmakers had to pick something that would make them stand out from "normal" people.
The aliens DO communicate...to those who can HEAR them, which probably is some kind of evolutionary leap. That is why they are only interested in THOSE people. Maybe the others are just part of why the world is so screwed up and the ones who can "hear" have a chance to create a different world.
3. Why give the future to a little girl to have it coded into streams of numbers and not tell people directly? Because the aliens DIDN'T give the information to Lucinda or people like her.....they were able to hear or intuit it in some manner and that is what distinguishes them as potential survivors for a new human race. Lucinda probably wasn't the ONLY one, but the movie had to have a focal point for the plot to revolve upon. Lucinda created this mystery as she picked up on these dates and numbers and put them into some kind of order out of chaos...which is what humans do.
4. Why didn't the aliens warn the world in general? Why didn't they STOP the end of the world? Because they could only take those who could "hear the call". Despite their advanced technology, they could not stop the solar flare as it's too big an event, nor could they take the entire human race, so some selection criteria was necessary. They picked those they thought would survive in a new world.
Even if they DID warn the world in general....there was nothing that could be done to change the situation or save everyone, and it would only have caused more panic.
Some ascribe cruelty to separating children from their parents, but this is a "salvage" operation, where only a few can be taken. The visions imparted to the children help them understand the gravity of the situation so they can prepare themselves psychologically.
5. Another criticism is that the behavior of Cage's character throughout this crisis is "implausible". This is ridiculous. How on earth does one behave during a plane crash....or the END OF THE WORLD????? No one knows. There could be a vast array of potential responses but the primary response that Cage shows repeatedly is the desire to save others and to prevent their pain and death. That is perhaps, the best, and most noble human impulse. Cage's actions may actually have saved lives and be part of the calculation of the death total for that event. At the end, when Cage goes to his father's house, he has become reconciled....to his father, to the end of life, to fate. For each of us, our death IS the End of the World and we must learn to accept it.
THIS IS A GREAT AND PROFOUND MOVIE that makes you think. It shows the end of the world, but it is a movie about faith. Those who have none and can conceive of none will probably hate it. But "everyone else" should give it a chance.