Knowing (2009) - Review

My wife and I watched Knowing while I was ill at the tail end of one of our engagements out of town last month. We had started watching Pay the Ghost, a review of which I will probably post this Thursday, before we had left and wanted to support my perplexing mission of reviewing each Nic Cage movie. Enough background discussion, let's get to the meat and potatoes!

Knowing is a 2009 Disaster/Thriller starring Nic Cage as John Koestler, a widowed single father and astrophysics professor at MIT. John's son Caleb grapples with the loss of his mother, asking whether he will see her again, and shares some interest with his father in the mysteries of the Universe, such as the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. Caleb receives a sheet of paper filled on both side sides with a seemingly random list of numbers, left behind in a time capsule 50 years prior by a child named Lucinda who in the introduction of the movie is believed to be a disturbed child. John gets his hands on the list and in a drunken stupor determines that the numbers indicate the times and number of people killed by some sort of major disasters, natural and otherwise. 

The film shows the battle of John Koestler wrestling with his abandoned faith, represented by his rejection of his family after the death of his wife, and the seemingly random nature of the Universe and the science of the pursuit of knowledge about it. When confronted by the numerology baked into the list, he must reconcile fate versus entropy while struggling to raise a child after his wife was taken from him some time prior to the beginning of the film. Lucinda's daughter Diana (Rose Byrne), is tracked down by Koestler and forced to confront the reality of what her mother has been trying to warn everyone around her for years while also raising a daughter by herself. 

Whatever strengths those themes play out on throughout the film, through some strong and convincing performances at times from Cage and Byrne, are dashed by the readied acceptance of Koestler that something is challenging his worldview. This part of the story screams as disingenuous when examined by his deep entrenchment at the beginning of the film against anything related to human destinies being determined by fate. All of this did little to deter my wife and I following the progression of the film until the very end, where a lengthy sequence tries to marry the dichotomy of choices that Koeslter has wrestled with for the entirety of the film, failing to take any sort of voice in the final presentation. This left both my wife and I, who were starting to sour at the movie by this point end, with our opinions of the first 90-95% of the movie negatively affected by the remaining part.