Start by looking promising, loses steam midway through, falls completely apart at the end

Rating: Null/10 (17 April 2009)

This sort of movie has become a standard Nick Cage fare – adventure, puzzles, thrills, with family sentimentality thrown in for good measure. It often works, but not this time, because this movie is trying too much to be big.
It starts out with a promising plot line – a time capsule from 50 years ago with a collection of grade school kids' vision of the future. One of those, instead of the usual drawing of space ship, contains entirely numbers. It turns out that the numbers are predictions of 50 years' disasters with accurate time, coordinates of location and number of casualties. By the time the capsule is opened, only 3 such disasters remain to happen.
This is rather gripping. But the movie makers seem to be interested only in creating an interesting opening of a chess game but never bother to finish it. The movie soon slips into banality, predictability and, worst of all, sloppiness. That, to be fair, is in terms of logics and credibility. The special effect, on the other hand, deserves due recognition.
As someone who watched an average of about 150 movies each year in the last few years, I don't think I'm easily impressed, let alone sacred, by a disaster scene. And yet, the first disaster in this movie really scared me, sort of made me jump and gasp. I wouldn't spoil you fun but would just say that it's not one of those cheap tricks of sudden, loud bangs. It's a combination of many things – well set up, sudden, realistic, imminent, overwhelming visual power. This is the best in all disaster scenes I've seen in any movie.
But this, together with a couple of other well executed disaster scenes, is not sufficient to salvage this movie. The story is unconvincing and its sentiment shallow. The delivery, except for special effects, is painting by number.
By the sheerest coincidence, browsing a video store just before this movie, I found and bought a DVD that I have been trying to find for a few years – "One the beach", made in 1959, exactly the same year the time capsule in "Knowing" was buried. Both stories are about the end of humanity. Comparing them, you can't help but see the huge contrary – the advance in technology of special effects and the regression in quality and depth of the script. Yes, I know, "Knowing" is not based on a good novel, but is that any excuse?