Movie Cliff's Notes: "Knowing"

Caution: this post is for those who don't want to lose 2 hours of their life watching a movie that they thought "might be okay". It's not. Read here to find out everything, including whether it's even watchable for camp value.

What's the deal?
Nic Cage's son gets a letter from a super creepy little kid in 1959. Via a time capsule. But instead of pictures of rocket ships and moon colonies, it's just a series of numbers. Because she was a super creepy kid. The time capsule was her idea too, 'natch.

Numbers aren't scary. What else you got?
Nic Cage is a recent widower, probably because pretty much anybody would fling themselves into a fire if they were married to him. His wife did. His son is creepy and maybe deaf, but not, because he can hear perfectly. There is one line of dialogue relating to this. I'm pretty sure it exists only so they can do some fairly sappy sign-language stuff to each other, without explaining it to the non-signing audience. Whatever.

That doesn't even sound relevant.
It's not. Sorry. So Nic Cage sees the date and body count for 9/11 randomly on the paper that his kid stole from the school. He overdoses on caffeine pills or something and spends all night looking up disasters and figuring out that every major loss of life in the world for the past 50 years is noted, time and date, on the paper. There are other numbers between each date that he can't figure out, though, even though he is an astrophysicist and they are longitude/latitude coordinates. He gives it to another scientist who can't figure it out either, even though everyone single person in the audience is probably shouting out "It's coordinates!" at this point.

Anyway, he freaks the hell out.

But are numbers on a piece of paper really scary?
No, and that's why there are also very ominous blonde guys who look like IKEA catalog models, or maybe winners of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer character costume contest, milling about in black dusters. They don't do anything until the last 20 minutes of the movie, except scare the crap out of the audience by staring at little kids. And collecting smooth black rocks for absolutely no relevant reason.

So... the numbers mean what?
There are, unfortunately for us, only 3 more incidents listed on the sheet when Cage does his sleuthing. He happens to be driving right next to one (a surprisingly violent and grisly airplane crash) and he seeks out the next in NYC (a less-surprisingly but still overly grisly subway accident). The next is like, 2 days later and doesn't have a body count. Nic is concerned. He seeks out the creepy little girl, but she's dead so he finds her grown-up daughter and grand-daughter instead. And stalks the hell out of them.

Why would he do such a thing?
Because he's Nic Cage and he can't help but lurk. He makes friends with the lady after stalking her and her daughter to the museum (with his son, by the way, who asks no questions and is probably used to his dad's psychotic behavior). Then he drops the we're-all-gonna-die bomb on her while they have coffee in the museum cafe. She reacts poorly, and fulfills the audience's fantasy by running away as fast as possible.

So we're really just figuring out what this last disaster is going to be, right? How much of the movie does that take? Probably the last 70 minutes or so. Also, the Spikes are moping around scaring kids, and Nic Cage is by-the-way estranged from his dad and hasn't opened his wife's last birthday present to him, and because the script says she has to come back, the lady shows up at Nic's house to chat about the end of the world. Which her mom, RIP, predicted.

Did you fast-forward at this point?
I should have. Lots of hand-wringing. There are solar flares, by the way, making it unseasonably warm and very conveniently disrupting cell phone usage during moments of dramatic tension. But not at later moments when, because satellites always get better in the middle of solar flaring, Nic has to call his dad and make peace.

I like my Nic Cage movies either funny (Raising Arizona) or batshit-crazy (The Wicker Man). What's in this movie for me?
I'm not sure we can top Wicker Man's bee business, but how about Nic Cage driving down the road shouting, "THE CAVES WON'T SAVE US!" into a cell-phone? It's pretty close to hilarity at that point.

Sum it all up for us, won't you?
Turns out, the Spikes are aliens. They planted the whole warning thing in the creepy little girl 50 years ago because obviously, the best way to warn the Earth about deadly solar flares would be to drive a single 8-year-old crazy by whispering numbers to her so continuously that she carves them into a door with her fingernails. I guess NASA wasn't returning their calls.

Is that the twist? Seems lame.
No, the lamer twist is that even though the Spikes are aliens, and even though they've been hanging around for 50 years and can see the future, they've decided that they don't have the energy to save humanity. They've just got a lot going in right now, you know? Instead, they're only going to save Nic Cage's son and the creepy girl's granddaughter, and spirit them off to an alien Iowa where trees grow REALLY huge.

Why was there a whole list of dates then? Why not just the last one, where the world is destroyed?
Good fucking question. THERE IS NO REASON TO LIST OUT ALL THE DATES. It is never explained, it's just there to be creepy and weird and maybe to give "weight" to the last date. You know, "Since the whole list is true maybe we should worry about the last item." Oh wait, never mind, because there's nothing anybody can do about giant solar flares. It's all a big tease.

So what, we all die?
Except for approximately 2 dozen little kids, who are deus ex machina'd at the last second to live on the aforementioned Iowa-planet. With no supervision, but lots of waves of grain to run through. Nic Cage and his dad reunite and become stranged, and then literally 45 seconds later are burned to a crisp along with everything else on the planet. Bummer.

Jesus.
Yeah. Also the aliens are angels.

Thanks for warning me about this movie. Any reason to watch it, even on cable?
Well, there's the crazy-bad acting by pretty much everybody in the movie. The aforementioned "CAVES!" line is only one amidst many that are laugh-out-loud stupid. If you like seeing our entire planet engulfed in flame, or an elk on fire (really!), it's got that too.

But you'll be left wondering why the Spike aliens gave these kids the numbers, only to go ahead and personally grab 'em right before the end of the world. Were the kids supposed to warn people? Was Nic Cage? Ultimately, the Spikes could've saved us all 2 hours and just nabbed those kids without all the useles Cassandra stuff. For an advanced alien intelligence, this was a pretty epic FAIL on their part. And on the part of director Alex Proyas, who has officially squandered every last drop of his Dark City-related good will.