The Thing About Predictions…

Knowing is so Lost – and that’s why I kind of mostly liked it.

Let’s see: Like the cult TV show (Side note to all the fair-weather Lost watchers: You suck and you’re missing out), Nicolas Cage’s latest starring vehicle involves a mysterious set of numbers, events that are supposed to happen, and a band of other people).

There’s also a plain crash, seemingly gifted children who go missing, as well as someone who knows more than she’s telling – Rose Byrne (FX’s Damages) – and someone, a man of reason (Cage, natch), who is confounded when everything he believes in is challenged for the purposes of the story.

Director Alex Proyas’ movie begins 50 years ago, when at a dedication ceremony for a new elementary school, a group of excited boys and girls is asked to draw what they think the future will look like, the drawings of which would be stored in a time capsule.

One of these students, a quiet wide-eyed loner-type (let’s just say creepy) girl, fills her sheet of paper with rows of apparently random numbers instead. And then she has a freak-out that hints to her having received those numbers somehow.

Cut to the present, when as part of an anniversary ceremony a new generation unearths the time capsule’s contents and the girl’s cryptic message ends up in the hands of young Caleb Koestler (young Chandler Canterbury), who’s day happens to be John Koestler (Cage), an MIT professor who is shocked to find out that these seemingly meaningless numbers actually are an encoded message predicting with fool-proof accuracy the dates, death tolls, and coordinates of every major disaster of the past 50 years.

Yeah, they couldn’t be lottery numbers…à la Lost. Ha!

As John further unravels the document’s chilling secrets, he realizes it foretells three additional events – the last of which hints at destruction on a global scale, and seems to somehow involve John and his son. Feeling chosen, double-natch, he tries to prevent more destruction from taking place. And with the reluctant help of Diana Wayland (Byrne) and her daughter Abby, the kin of that creepy girl from 50 years ago, John makes it his mission to avert the end of the world.

That is until he realizes the thing about predictions, thanks to those other people I mentioned before (I won’t say anything so as not to be a wet blanket).

I’ll just say that Knowing had me wrapped up in its apocalypse-happy finger until the third act, when religious faith-debunked by supernatural science undertones crept in.

As a sci-fi piece, this one gets off to a bit of a slow start, but once it gets cooking, the smell had me at the edge of my seat wanting to taste some more. Heck, Knowing even made me actually like and not just endured Nicolas Cage.

My Rating ***

Photo: Summit Entertainment.