It’s so annoying when a film starts off quite interesting, leads into a dramatic action packed edge-of-the-seat middle, and then just fails miserably fobbing you off with an ending which is just ridiculous. It could have been so much more.
Knowing is about a professor (Nicholas Cage ) who stumbles on terrifying predictions about the future, more specifically future tragedies, and sets out to prevent them from coming true as you do.
Where have these predictions come from and what are they? Well, that’s anyone’s guess but the film does attempt to explain it by revealing that in 1959 a group of students are asked to draw pictures to be stored in a time capsule, but of course there’s always one weirdo in the class. One mysterious girl who is plagued by whispering voices that no one else can hear fills her sheet with rows of apparently random numbers.
Fifty years later the time capsule is unearthed and handed out to a new generation of students. The sheet with the numbers goes to Caleb Myles who is of course the son of MIT astrophysicist Ted Myles (Cage ). Ted who is still struggling to come to terms with the death of his wife is a sceptic believing that events in people’s lives are not predetermined. However, he notices a sequence in the numbers, that they are actually dates and co-ordinates of disasters such as 9/11 plus the exact number of people killed in each.
While Ted is running around willy nilly there are these strange (sun-deprived ) men stalking his son and handing out pebbles to those who can hear their whispers (bit creepy ). Oh and they also happen to meet the daughter and granddaughter of the weirdo kid who started this all off and together they attempt to find answers.
I think one of the fundamental mistakes in this film is the casting of Nicholas Cage in the first place; Well I find him annoying, he’s no good and he looks the same in every role. Then again, there are some badly scripted lines in this film that any seasoned actor would struggle to deliver.
There are plenty of nice action scenes and the graphics are quite nifty too but this fails to save the quite disappointing ending. It’s a pity because there was so much potential. I still don’t know what the pebbles were for.
Verdict: 2/5
