Knowing

Are there things man is not meant to know?

Knowing is a 2009 science fiction/disaster movie starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Alex Proyas.

The film begins in 1959 with a girl named Lucinda Embry who is shown repeating seemingly random numbers. At the elementary school where she goes, her class makes a time capsule filled with various drawings and letters to the people of the future. Lucinda's contribution, however, is a piece of paper that simply has numbers written on it.

Fifty years later, the elementary school class of Dr. John Koestler's son, Caleb, opens up the capsule. Caleb finds Lucinda's piece of paper, taking it home with him, puzzled by the numbers. John begins obsessing over it, soon discovering the numbers are not random, but, rather, are the exact dates and death tolls of every major disaster in the past fifty years. These prove to be accurate for everything from hotel fires to 9/11. However, not all of these are for past events as there are a handful of predictions that haven't happened yet.

---

Tropes used in Knowing include:

• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Through the whole film, the aliens appear as humans. At the end of the film, they reveal their true form.
• Artistic License Astronomy: The only way a solar flare that size could be so perfectly targeted at Earth would be if Earth was the size of Jupiter.
  • And even then it's doubtful it would blow the crust off of the Earth; more likely a solar flare would wreck havoc with the atmosphere and knock out satellites and electronics but everything else theoretically would probably be okay.
• Artistic License: There's no Artistic License - Philosophy trope, but the explanation John gives of determinism is hopelessly lacking. Determinism does not imply a reason for things to happen, only a necessity. Also, whether determinism rules out randomness and chance is a topic of contention.
• California Doubling: Or, more accurately, Australia Doubling; most of the movie was shot in and around Melbourne.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin': Diana drives against red light to be able to catch up to the "kidnappers" of the children. She obviously gets hit by a truck and dies.
• Children Are Innocent: Played fairly straight, especially when it's mostly kids who hear the call of the angel things to leave earth.
• Cosmic Horror Story
• Creepy Child: Lucinda.
• Ending Tropes:
  • Apocalypse How: Planetary, Total Extinction. Scientists were predicting the flare to wipe out all life through radiation, but it simply burns Earth into a rocky, airless wasteland
  • Apocalypse Wow: The shot of New York being enveloped by a wall of fire easily gives the similar scene in Independence Day a run for its money.
  • Earthshattering Kaboom: Closer to Earth Boiling Ka-foom, but hey. It's pretty much the same result - Earth ends up a burned out, lifeless husk with no atmosphere - more or less a big asteroid.
  • Gainax Ending: Just see the Plot Hole section in the YMMV page to see just how confusing it is.
  • Kill'Em All: Almost.
  • Twist Ending: Adam and Eve Plot: Judging by the multiple ships we see, it seems like several couples of Adams and Eves in fact.
• The End of the World as We Know It.
• Energy Beings: It's never made clear if they were aliens or angels (given their ability to predict the future with great precision).
• Harsher in Hindsight: If NASA is to be believed, the predicted 2013 solar flare won't burn the Earth to crisp like in the movie, but it may shut down all electricity for up to a few months.
• Hot Mom: Diana
• Identical Granddaughter: Lucinda and Abby.
• If Jesus, Then Aliens: All but literally.
• Lecture as Exposition: This is probably the reason Cage's character is a college professor.
• Meaningful Name: Lucinda Embry bears remarkable similarity to the words 'lucid ember', another early allusion to the Earth burning to a crisp.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The trailers made the movie sound like a story about a man trying to find out whether the future was fixed or if he could save people from the predicted disasters. Instead we got a lot of running around just to meet an alien Noah.
• Oh Crap: As John and Diana would discover, EE means Everyone Else.
• The Oner: The entire airplane crash sequence is shot in one take.
• Red Herring: Played straight every time Nicolas Cage wants to stop a disaster from happening.
  • While stuck in traffic, Nicolas Cage works out that he's on the exact co-ordinates of the next disaster. He gets out of his car and walks to where the hold-up is; a stalled LPG tanker. Just when you're wondering how he's ever going to survive when the tanker explodes, a passenger airliner falls out of the sky behind him.
  • Also, as detailed above, the design of the Whisper People is deliberately sinister. Their similarity in appearance to The Strangers from Dark City (also directed by Alex Proyas) cannot possibly be a coincidence.
  • The numbers say that people will die in New York and the movie mentions how people in New York are scared about a possible terrorist attack. Cage goes to the place where the attack will take place and sees a weird looking guy and chases him thinking he is a terrorist. Turn out the guy was stealing disks and then the train immediately malfunctions and kills people like the numbers predicted.
• Room Full of Crazy: Lucinda's whole house, but particularly what John finds when he lifts up the bed.
• Rule of Symbolism: Practically the whole damned movie, but that woodblock print marked Ezekiel I isn't just for show. Also, the ending turns this into an Adam and Eve Plot.
• Scare Chord: As if the whole soundtrack wasn't creepy. See Soundtrack Dissonance below.
• Science Hero: Dr. John Koestler
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog/You Cannot Fight Fate: One of the biggest criticisms against the movie was that all of Nicolas Cage's actions amount to zilch in the end. For all the good knowing the future did, he could have banged the hot leading lady and smoked a cigarette as the aliens took the kids and the world fried.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: This movie flips between the ideas of complete randomness and everything happening for a reason all too much.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Beethoven's 7th during the The End of the World as We Know It? Hideki Anno would be impressed.
• Throat Light
• Zeerust: The 1959 children's drawings of the year 2009.