Reviewed by Alicia Glass

Review Rating: 8

An astrophysics teacher receives a prophetic letter from a time capsule unearthed in his sons’ elementary school, and begins piecing together the end of the world.

This one has a plot that’s a bit hard to try summing up in a few sentences, but I did my best. Bearing in mind, I am as far as I know one of the very few people who likes Nicholas Cage as an actor just fine, I thought he did well in things like Con Air and Ghost Rider. The director of this fine film is one of my more favorites, Alex Proyas, who also directed things like The Crow and Dark City, and boy does he go to town with the plot. It’s not as though you can really guess what’s going on even halfway through the movie, but Proyas doesn’t try and wring every last drop of suspense from it either, like Shymalan. And when the big surprise finally does come, even I wasn’t expecting that, and I love it when that happens.

So we have Cage as John Koestler, astrophysicist (coincidence?) widower with a young son. And his son Caleb, who of course goes to the elementary school that had a girl plagued with visions 50 years ago when the capsule was laid in the ground, is of course handed the letter from the girl and gives it to the one person who might actually figure out what it is and what it means: his father. From there, after John has translated all the letters numbers with some help and is relegated to running around trying to stop or help the disasters springing up around him, the movie takes a distinct turn for the action sequences. But don’t let that fool you, there’s all sorts of other strange things going on in the shadows, and they have consequences for the entire world!

It’s a real shame that this movie was compared far too readily to another Cage movie, NEXT (which I also enjoyed), and most people didn’t care for Knowing for some reason I still can’t figure out. We need more like these, where good plot is tossed together with just-right action and emotional scenes!

Sadly, Knowing will most likely be lost to the pile of movies overshadowed by Star Trek and Wolverine.