“Knowing” Wants It Both Ways

Wants It Both Ways

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

KNOWING is a film that looks promising at the beginning but then falls apart as it gets more and more preposterous.

Nicolas Cage stars as John Koestler, a professor of astrophysics at MIT, and one day his son, Caleb, comes home from school with an envelope that was handed out to him at a school ceremony which will change their lives and the world around them.

Before that, a prologue from 1959 has shown us what is in the envelope and who was responsible for it.

Back then, the new elementary school had a dedication ceremony for which the children were asked to draw a picture of what they thought the world would look like 50 years later in 2009, and the pictures were put into a time capsule that was buried at the school.

However, one strange little girl, instead of drawing a picture, had covered her paper with nothing but numbers. That is the paper that Caleb had been given.

John and Caleb have a special bond between them ever since John’s wife and Caleb’s mother was killed in an accident some years earlier. They repeat a ritual saying that goes “You and me together . . . forever.”

Well, late one night John is studying the list of numbers to try to make sense out of them, and he discovers “91101” in the list with “2996” immediately after it. On a hunch he researches the tragedy of September 11, 2001, and learns that 2,996 people were killed in the World Trade Towers that day.

Using that as his starting point, John then realizes that the date of every major disaster is in the numbers, along with the number of casualties following the date.

However, if that weren’t frightening enough, according to John’s system in the numbers, three major disasters haven’t occurred yet, but are going to happen soon within the next year.

Granted, there are more numbers than just dates and casualties, but when John discovers what they mean, the piece of paper becomes even more frightening.

Now, the special effects are fantastic, but here is where the story starts to become preposterous. Then it gets really preposterous.

And then even more preposterous than that.

KNOWING wants to have it both ways and then every way possible after that, but you have to see it to understand what I mean, and I don’t recommend it.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”