Knowing

Objective Rating (How much merit I think it deserves):
5/10
Subjective Rating (How much I personally like it):
5/10

Year released: 2009
Runtime: 121 minutes
IMDB page: here

It was a jumble of a lot of used ideas. You just keep thinking what pieces of other movies they are gonna try to stuff into this one movie. It wasn't that bad, but... eh. I've always been a bit attracted to the whole prophecy/apocalypse idea, so I probably liked the movie a lot more than I should.

Plot: John is a widower with a little son, Caleb. John is also a professor of physics at MIT. Caleb's elementary school buried a time capsule 50 years ago and dug it up now for the 50th anniversary. Other children got cartoon drawings of rockets and robots, what the students 50 years ago predicted the future would be like. Caleb got a piece of paper covered with numbers. John didn't think much about it, before he discovers some of the numbers correspond with dates of large-scale disasters like 9/11 and the number of people who died in each disaster. There are still 3 dates on the paper that haven't happened yet, but the last date, instead of giving the number of the casualties, is followed by the letters "EE."

Cast: Nicolas Cage as John is his usual self, the mixture of tenderness toward his son and obsession as a physics professor. Rose Byrne, as the single mother that John meets and the daughter of the little girl who wrote all those numbers 50 years ago, is QUITE different from the Alex she played in Wicker Park. In this movie she's a lot thinner and a lot more annoying. Perhaps it's just her character's fault. She's basically feeble-minded and a bit unthinking.

Script: Like I said, a lot of jumbled bits of past movies that worked. There's some X-Files elements thrown in there, some of The Forgotten, some of all the previous prophecy/Armageddon movies combined. Nice elements, but all together in one movie? Result: dubious.

Production: Some very nice visual effects, with a plane crash and a subway crash and... well, just crashes.

I almost fell asleep near the end (but not AT the end), and this movie deserves better. But not much better. It was exciting at times, but definitely not a masterpiece.