In Knowing, the children of William Dawes Elementary School eagerly complete their assignment. It's 1959, and they are asked to draw a picture of the future in 50 years to be sealed inside a time capsule that will be exhumed in fall of the unimaginably distant 2009. Most of the kids draw robots and spaceships-all except Lucinda, the scared and sullen last-row-in-class child who covers her sheet of paper with row upon row of numerals.
When the capsule is finally opened 50 years later, one of the school's 21st-century pupils, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury), shows Lucinda's mathematical picture of the future to his dad. It so happens that dad, John Koestler (Nicolas Cage), is an astrophysics professor at MIT. A light comes on while glancing at the ranks of numbers. Working altogether too quickly with the aid of the Internet, Koestler pieces together a pattern in the numbers, a prophecy for dates and casualties of train wrecks, airline crashes, hotel fires, even 9/11. Before long he discovers that other sets of numbers on the sheet are GPS coordinates for where the disasters occurred. A trio of catastrophes is scheduled for the next several weeks of '09. Can Koestler stop them?
He seeks out Lucinda for answers, only to find that the troubled woman killed herself years earlier. But Lucinda's daughter and granddaughter prove to be missing pieces in the vast, unfolding puzzle. And who are those Aryan-looking men in black who begin stalking Koestler and offering Caleb smooth black stones as gifts?
Knowing should have hinged on the points Koestler introduced early on in one of his lectures, the age-old question of determinacy-versus-randomness. In everyday language, is there a reason for everything or does shit just happen? With his wife dead and faith in his pastor-father's Protestantism long faded, Koestler is an uncertain adherent to randomness. But like many other aspects of Knowing, the theme isn't developed intelligently or persuasively. The plot lunges along without logic, the work of too many hacks and not enough brains. Sad-eyed Nic Cage, speaking in the resonantly articulate, professorial vowels of the East Coast elite, gives a good performance even in the silliest moments. He should demand a veto over his scripts.
The career of the movie's director, Alex Proyas, got off to a good start years ago with Dark City, a film that influenced The Matrix. In Knowing he maintains a painterly twilight look for interiors and conjures up some cool visions of the mysterious "Whisper People," the men in black whom only certain children can hear. The beginning and the end of Knowing are interesting, the middle is a muddle. It could have been much better.
