Extra-tempestrials

Rating: 8/10 (4 August 2019)

In my view this is a fictional movie about evolved humans from the future that are able to travel into the past. The biologist Dr. Michael Paul Masters calls the beings shown in 'Knowing' extra-tempestrials. The extra-tempestrials leave warnings about impending doom to their distant ancestors. The humanoid future humans (angel like) seen at the end are able to telepathically transmit information about catastrophic future events. Foreknowledge of future events (from our point in time) is pretty easy when you are from the future and are looking back in time! Contemporary humans are still working out the theory of time travel. For humanity to survive in the movie and to be able evolve into their future form, selected telepathically gifted children are saved from a destructive solar flare, by transporting them to a new home, an earth-like ecosystem around a different sun. Solar flares of the depicted magnitude are unrealistic, but the movie solar flare can be substituted for a more realistic catastrophic extinction level event, for instance an asteroid impact. It's strange that the spaceship only collects a boy and a girl. If the movie script was more faithful to the biblical template then 144.000 would have been saved. I think there are 12 vessels in the movie each transporting a boy and a girl, analogous to the twelve tribes of Israel. The theme of leaving a stone at the place where a person perishes on this world, adheres to the jewish custom of placing stones on graves of departed ones, to remember them by (or as a symbol of their memory). The sheet of numerological predictions given to John Koestler is simply a plot device to get him to bring his son and Diana's daughter to the designated pickup location. This cunning plan is foiled by Diana not believing John Koestler (Nicholas Cage) and running off by herself and crashing her car, so that the 'angels' intervene personally. They succeed in preserving the germline of John and Diana, that is needed for the evolution of the new race of humans. The physicist Stephen Hawking asks in his posthumous book 'Brief Answers to the Big Questions' whether time travel is possible. The answer is that it is a "very serious question" that our current understanding cannot rule out and which can be approached scientifically. The whole movie is nicely executed with great special effects. So, there you go. :-)