Knowing Starring Nicolas Cage

Running Time: 130 minutes
From: Escape Artist and Summit Entertainment
Genre: Thriller/Science Fiction

From the Movie Poster: What Happens When The Numbers Run Out?

As the movie opens it is 1959, the William Dawes Elementary School is finally finished with construction and to commemorate the occasion, they're burying a time capsule with drawings of the future kept safe inside. That is except for Lucinda Emery, she's burying numbers....

Flash to present day - 50 years later - Caleb Koestler (Chandler Canterbury) is participating in retrieving a time capsule. Inside are pictures, except for one that ends up in Caleb's hands. His father, MIT Professor and astrophysicist John Koestler (Nicolas Cage) sees correlation between the numbers and catastrophes throughout history. Hurricanes, plane crashes, the Kennedy Assassination, floods, fires, 911, shootings, and the death of his wife one year earlier in a hotel fire. And there are three dates left on the paper. He soon discovers that a second group of numbers gives location in longitude and latitude. Who will he tell? What will he do? Caleb has started having visions and visitors who wanted to take him away, to protect him.


John tries to contact Lucinda, but she has died from a drug overdose due to medications prescribed for her presumed mental illness. Her daughter, Diana Wayland (Rose Byrne), first rebuffs John only to seek him out later, saying her mother always told her the day she was going to die....it will happen in just two short days. And her daughter, Abby (Lara Richardson - also plays young Lucinda), has started to have visions and visitors who want to take her away, protect her. What is happening?

As John further works with the numbers, more information is discovered, in two days 33 people will die, maybe one of them Diana. It will be a mass catastrophe like the Earth as never seen. John is an astrophysicist who has been predicting solar flares, but the flare that is to occur is the biggest recorded in history, it was suppose to happen in space. But something has happened and now it is directed at Earth. John discovered with Diana's help that instead of 33, it is actually EE, Diana's mother's term for Everyone Else. It would seem the destruction of Earth is at hand and no one can prevent it. The visitor are only interested in the children who have had the visions, to rebuild on another planet, another tree of life.

Nicolas Cage happens to be one of my favorite actors since Valley Girls and Peggy Sue Got Married. The 1980's were a long time ago, but that's when I discovered him. I have seen nearly all of his movies, a few I wish I hadn't, but only a few. In Knowing, he is the one who figures out all the events that have happened and that are yet to come. He has fallen away from his pastor father since the death of his wife. He can't accept that there is a God that would take someone so important away from him. Later, after remembering his wife's wishes, he makes peace with his family as they wait together for the end to come.

Knowing is a scifi thriller that can be viewed as just that, a thriller. Others have said it should be viewed through a biblical eye, viewed as the hand of God and the rebirth of mankind. I'll let you choose. I knew none of this before agreeing to go see the movie. It was an excellent movie as long as you're a viewer who enjoys massively destructive movies. The special effects were amazingly well done. This movies brings CGI to a new level, in that the opening scene of the movie shows the Earth imploding in on itself, the viewer just doesn't realize what it is, that it is in fact the Earth, and doesn't know why.........yet.

Here's the trailer for Knowing.


And some fun from Valley Girl in 1983.


And to back 1986 for Peggy Sue Got Married.