Good Movie to Know

Rating: 8/10 (8 October 2009)

M. Night Shyamalan's Signs purported that it would illustrate that everything in life happens for a reason. Knowing starring Nicholas Cage and directed by Alex Proyas, comes closer to making this argument.
Nicholas Cage is John Koestler, an astrophysicist who is mourning the loss his wife while raising his son, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) as best he can. In one of his classes John broaches the subject of Randomness versus Determinism, is life a series of random events that man seeks to find meaning in, or do events happen for a reason? Is Earth the right distance from the Sun for life to flourish just by chance or did some force place it there? As part of a school project a time capsule is opened at Caleb's school where 50 years earlier the students put in the capsule their visions of the future. Caleb gets Lucinda's, a strange young girl who wrote a series of random looking numbers on a page. Is Caleb receiving Lucinda's paper a random act? Or was it meant to be? Almost immediately Caleb starts hearing garbled messages from what he calls the whisper people. John discovers the page in Caleb's backpack and looking it over starts to notice the numbers correspond to dates of tragedy's and the number of people killed. He is shocked to see the date of his wife's death on the page, and that there's three more sets of numbers that haven't occurred yet. John sets out to find the meaning behind the numbers and avert the coming tragedy's.
John enlists the help of Diane Wayland (Rose Byrne) and Abby who are the daughter and granddaughter of Lucinda, to see if they can help decipher the meaning of the numbers. Lara Robinson plays both Lucinda and Abby and she ably evokes the strangeness of Lucinda, and the innocence of Abby so well, I almost thought they were two different actresses. As John and Diana struggle to make sense of the numbers the whisper people seem to have an inordinate amount of interest in the children and their numbers seem to be growing, but their presence isn't what it seems to be and leads to a conclusion that is at once unexpected and emotionally moving.
Without giving away too much of the ending, a lot of reviewers have said how they thought the ending relied to heavily or resorted to a Biblical ending. I didn't see it that way, I see it more as a case of, if aliens came to Earth thousands of years ago our ancestors would see these beings and their characteristics as being those of gods or angels, and not necessarily Gods or angels.
I thought Cage's performance in Knowing was moving, and at times he related the characters pain so well it was almost palpable. It seems he's returned the power to his acting. The rest of the cast was equally engaging, I've already mentioned Lara Robinson in her dual role. Chandler Canterbury is engaging as Caleb.
The bonus features. The making of documentary is interesting with some insight behind the production of the movie, especially in it's earliest stages. There's also a documentary the Visions of the Apocalypse which features scholars talking about the ramifications of the end of the world but it drags on a little too long. The directors commentary I found flat and uninspired as if Alex Proyas was uninterested in doing it or just didn't know what to say about his movie.