A Film That Already Seems Like You Know It

Rating: 4/10 (23 August 2010)

Knowing is a science fiction disaster movie directed by Alex Proyas and stars Nicolas Cage, Rose Byrne, and Chandler Canterbury. The film takes place in modern day New York state.
The films starts off in an elementary school in 1959 with a little girl Lucinda. Lucinda is haunted by voices she is hearing in her head and when her teacher asks her and the rest of her class to draw their picture of the future for a time capsule she just writes a lot of meaningless numbers (or are they?). Later that day Lucinda goes missing for a while but then she is found by her teacher in a closet where she clawed some last numbers on the door. Then it is cut to present day where the time capsule is taken out of the ground and John Koestler's (Cage) son, Caleb (Canterbury), gets Lucinda's page of numbers from the time capsule. John accidentally discovers that some of these numbers are the date of 9/11 and the exact number of people killed then (It's a good thing he discovered this or else it would just be a movie about how Nicolas Cage needs to get a haircut). After a while John comes to the conclusion that there are three more disasters left on the list and the last one is, ooh my, the end of the world! The acting in this film was dreadful. The best of them was the Oscar winner Nicolas Cage who was somewhat decent as John Koestler. He really brought nothing to the table as the lead and basically read the lines and put on a concerned face. Rose Byrne plays the mother of a girl that can also here the whispers that Lucinda and Caleb can hear and she was terrible, so much so that I grew to hate her as the film went on. She was just made terrible decisions when the film lead you to believe that she was a somewhat intelligent woman. Her acting made her unlikable though. I am not going to say anything bad about the child actors, but none of them were as good as Haley Joel Osment.
The screenplay for this film was just so typical. I felt like I saw it already a hundred times and every supposed twist was a yawn. It was entirely predictable, I always knew the next step. I may have not known the next step after that but it was soon made clear before I reached it. This is the screenwriters first big film but that doesn't mean it has to be as bad as this.
Overall I give this film a solid 4/10 due to its poor acting, weak script, and below par direction. I would recommend this film to fans of the sci-fi and disaster genre.