Science AND religion!

Rating: 8/10 (1 August 2009)

I'm buying this in Blu-Ray! I never expected to be so taken by this movie. Usually, everyone is all atwitter about any big budget movie with deep messages. I never heard a peep about "Knowing". I heard about the new "War of the Worlds", but this movie is much better.
When I saw that this was classified as a sci-fi, but that the plot was about prophecy, I rolled my eyes. I guessed that this was another example of dumbing down science, tying science to nonsense. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
I take exception with the many negative comments found here. Maybe some miss the sci-fi angles. For example, the transmitted number sequences are NOT "prophecies", in the sense of foretelling the future, predestined "fate", if the "whisper people" travel time as well as space. They "know" what has happened. This idea is left unstated. However, time travel is more reasonable than divining predestined fate.
Many can't stand the ending. Every story shouldn't have a fairy tale ending, for everyone in the story that is. In fact, THIS story DOES have a fairy tale ending, of a sort, the very best it could have. "We" are saved! The "Earth" is saved! There is plenty left unstated in the film. For example, several Bible tie-ins (and less-specific "prophecies", permitting non-Christian perspective) point to the revealed "angels" at the end. Unless one is familiar with the suggestion of "angels" of the Old Testament, "flying", in "glowing, white clothing" actually being visiting spacemen, the quick, significant scene of the aliens levitating with glowing streamers around them might be overlooked. Rabbits aboard, and deer in the area, strongly hints that the "vessels" (for lack of a better word) are "Noah's Ark" for all life on our little blue planet.
"Knowing" bridges the ever-widening gap between religion and science because it provides a way that prophets of old could have witnessed the same "whisper people" in their time. If a good magician from our time could totally baffle some poor shepherds 3,000 years ago, imagine how these super-science "angels" ("messengers") could spawn whole new religions by "flying", healing, raising the "dead", or whispering prophecies. Zealots could even argue that, perhaps due to supposed increasing wickedness today, the whisper people are REAL Angels and God is purging the Earth again, another Genesis story.
There is an expectation, that "super-science" (science yet beyond our present knowledge) might someday turn our present understanding on its ear. "Use the Force, Luke" will remain a fantasy, but "anti-gavity" will, almost certainly, be a fact someday. It is best to leave the details of super-science fuzzy and mysterious, as done here. I applaud the filmmakers for not falling into the (overdone) shortcut of Star Trek transporters or Stargates as an (unlikely) cheat to move things around.
However, I was quite disappointed that these weird aliens were, not just bipedal quadrupeds, with a brain and heart in exactly the "right" places, but were an exact silhouette of an Earth man. This could have been done better. The effects were VERY well done.