Knowing

This was an f-ing weird movie. Really strange. Why did they make it? What were they thinking? Has Alex Proyas gone insane? Can Nicholas Cage no longer act at all? Why are child actors annoying? To sound like a lame movie reviewer, I came away 'knowing' far less than when I went to see it.

The plot of the movie starts out interesting enough- Nicholas Cage's son gets a letter from a school's time capsule that is a seemingly random series of numbers. Cage, in his infinite wisdom as a metaphysics professor at MIT (yeah, did they have to make it at MIT? Really?), discovers it is a code for all major disasters, listing the dates, places and number dead. The last number is (gasp) coming up soon and says EVERYONE will die. Oh dear. But also, his kid hears things and wears a hearing aid because sounds get mixed up in his head (huh?).

However, (SPOILERS!) the movie takes quite a turn from the usual disaster film. Cage is the son of an austere preacher, and hasn't spoken to him in years, The woman who wrote the letter draws creepy scenes from revelation, and there is quite a lot of talk of heaven and the afterlife. Well, then the film just nosedives down the Christian path, and it turns out that while the earth is doomed from a natural disaster, it has become a sort of end of days last judgement situation with some friendly aliens. And then, the people who are saved from Earth get dropped off in some bizarre Garden of Eden complete with glowing apple tree. Say what?

I love me a good religious spook thriller (see "Haunting of Molly Hartley"), but this was INSANE! It was like BAM Christian mythology. BAM theres a priest. BAM atone for your sins. And all this from the amazing director of "Dark City" and "The Crow".The weirdest thing to me is that none of this was featured in the trailers. It was marketed as a mainstream creepy thriller of some sort. I wonder why.