'Ezekiel saw the wheel - way up in the middle of the air.'

Rating: 5/10 (14 December 2010)

KNOWING will find an audience, whether that audience is the science fiction aficionados, the spiritualists, those waiting for 2012 ideas, or those who enjoy thrillers. It is a mixed bag - based on a story by Ryne Douglas Pearson who adapted it for the screen with Juliet Snowden and Stiles White - that depends heavily on the audience's perception of Nicholas Cage: after a string of films that cast him as a mad man it is nice to see him in a humanistic role. Alex Proyas directs.
50 years ago a school closed and the new school that opened to replace it called for a ceremony that included the burying of a time capsule full of children's drawings about what they felt the future would hold in 50 years. At the ceremony the enveloped drawings are dispersed among the class and Caleb Koestler (Chandler Canterbury) opens an envelope that is simply a page of numbers: Caleb begins to hear voices, but is reassured by his widowed astrophysicist father John Koestler (Nicholas Cage) that it is probably due to Caleb's hearing aide. But as John examines the list of numbers with his fellow associate Ben (Phil Mendelsohn) he begins to discover that the numbers are not random but are instead dates of horrible accidents or events followed by the number of lives lost in that event: the obvious number sequence is 9/11. John follows events that are predicted and finally discovers that an event listed as the last number set is predicting the end of the world. The little girl who made the original list lived a strange life and in her lineage is an adult (Rose Byrne) who has a daughter Abby (Laura Robinson) who is Caleb's best friend and also hears the voices Caleb hears. Together the two families explore the ramifications of the numbers and the film speedily progresses to a fantasy ending.
The story itself is interesting and the acting is fine - up to the point that the inevitable CGI effects take over. Then it becomes a matter of taste as to whether the viewer needs to have details splashed all over the screen or merely keep the story in the imagination of the viewers' minds. As Hollywood so often forgets, sometimes less is more, and in this case what could have been a rather tender film becomes another loud apocalyptic disaster sequence.
Grady Harp