Knowing(2009)- User Reviews

Perhaps one needs to be a fan of the "End of the World" genre and of the high possibility of psychic phenomenon to get into this film. Sure, the plotline strains credulity, but then isn't it rather impossible to know what the reality of this inevitable fact will be like? We all know that stars have massive flares, and that such a flare would indeed destroy life on our planet, saw at least that part is potentially factual. One weak point of the film is explaining just why the extraterrestial sources of the puzzling code of a massive string of numbers that predicts all the major disasters of the coming 50 years, choose to deliver this to poor psychic but highly disturbed little girl in a document that will be buried until the last three are to occur is beyond my understanding (perhaps they don't give a darn about all those humans who are to die, merely wanting to alert someone before the biggest disaster of all, the destruction of all life on the planet. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, this is a thrilling adventure of less than a week in real time (though of course there are flashbacks back to 1959 when the time capsule containing that list is created and buried). Cage is believable as he moves from doubt, to wonderment, to passionate belief that he must try to act in order to prevent the predicted disasters. It isn't until 3/4 of the way into the story that he discovers that the end of the world is at predicted to occur that very same week. And not until nearly the very end does he learn the scientific source of the coming apocalypse. The writers threw in a brief but intense love affair for Cage with the beautiful daughter of the disturbed psychic, now grown up and with a young girl of her own. Cage (a professor of astrophysics at M.I.T.--thus enabling him to grasp what the sun can do)had been tragically left a widower a year earlier when his wife died in a fire--also predicted in that series of numbers, has a brilliant and sensitive son the same age as that young girl, and the two instantaneously connect. When the two adults realize their attraction and fated bond, we learn that the grown up psychic of 1959 (Lucinda) had repeatedly told her daughter the exact date that she would die--the very date of the end, when as she frantically scratched into the wooden bottom of her bed, "Everyone Else" will die. The viewers are treated to glimpses of what the children call "The Whisper People" who are visually creepy enough, which only intensifies as they reveal the future, both good and bad, in visual and auditory flashes. After seeing this story, which truthfully fascinated me, I would have to say that the the music for the end of the world should indeed be the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony as it is portrayed here in a brilliant and moving scene just before the fires rain down from the heavens. Speaking of which, those closing scenes are amongst the most frightening and believable in any of this genre. The subplot of the devout Christian preacher (Cage's estranged father)and his strong faith as he faces the inevitable with grace and a firm belief in the heaven to come will no doubt have a strong appeal to those fellow believers who would actually welcome such a fate. But fortunately, the filmakers focus on the discovery of the mystery behind those numbers and the incredible drama of the final days so that such beliefs are in no way necessary to the evocative power of this film.