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Knowing


The film Knowing stars Nicolas Cage and Rose Byrne. I'm not sure why I expected more from this movie than I did; I should know by now that sometimes Nicolas Cage's films don't always live up to what they should be. The film starts out as a supernatural thriller before morphing into an apocalyptic disaster story about half way through the movie. In the end there were strange parallels to the recent remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still (starring Keanu Reeves who also has one acting mode like Cage, however, Reeves' one mode annoys me far less than Cage does) that made me feel like Knowing was really a rip off of The Day The Earth Stood Still with a far more bleaker ending.

In 1959 a young girl puts a piece of paper covered with an extremely long series of numbers into her class's time capsule. Half a century later that time capsule is unearthed and unsealed and John's (Nicolas Cage) son, Caleb, receives the girl's 'vision of the future.' John, a functioning alcoholic who uses liquor to dull the pain of a recent personal tragedy, becomes obsessed with the numbers' sequence and spends an entire alcohol fueled night deciphering the meaning behind the numbers. He is shocked to discover that the numbers reveal the location, date and number of casualties for every major disaster over the last fifty years. However, the last several numbers are for dates set several days in the future. John then tracks down the daughter of the girl who recorded the numbers and enlists her (extremely) reluctant help in solving the mystery of the disasters foretold for the last three dates. It is at the point of finally resolving the puzzle of the last disaster that the movie drastically swings in a different direction before hurtling on to the cheesiest, hoakiest ending of a movie that I've witnessed in a long time.

You can see this movie for yourself or don't. It is available upon request from Annville Free Library, Palmyra Public Library, and Richland Community Library.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie
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