until the end of the...

Rating: 6/10 (26 July 2009)

There has been many a movie about people discovering important clues in seemingly random topics: "The Da Vinci Code" and "The Number 23" are examples. Now, director Alex Proyas ("The Crow", "Dark City", "I, Robot") brings us "Knowing". Nicolas Cage plays a college professor who lost his wife a year earlier. In his MIT class, he teaches students about randomness (things just happen) vs determinism (everything happens for a reason).
When a time capsule gets opened, his son finds a strange paper written by a girl fifty years earlier. While at first looking like a bunch of arbitrary numerals, he realizes that it shows the dates of famous disasters and the fatalities therein. Sure enough, it starts to look as if this relates to him.
I found most of the movie intriguing - I've never come across any series of numbers (anything else) that looks like what the flick portrays - although it seemed as if the end got kind of religious. If you ignore that part, the rest of the movie is pretty enjoyable (although I still consider "The Crow" Proyas's best movie). Just pay attention the next time that you see a list of things.