Knowing (2009) Review by Dr.Octagonapus

Fifty years later, a new generation of students examines the capsules
contents and the girls cryptic message ends up in the hands of young
CALEB MYLES. But it is Calebs father, professor TED MYLES (Nicolas
Cage), who makes the startling discovery that the encoded message
predicts with pinpoint accuracy the dates, death tolls and coordinates
of every major disaster of the past 50 years. As Ted further unravels
the documents chilling secrets, he realizes the document foretells
three additional eventsthe last of which hints at destruction on a
global scale and seems to somehow involve Ted and his son. When Teds
attempts to alert the authorities fall on deaf ears, he takes it upon
himself to try to prevent more destruction from taking place.
With the reluctant help of DIANA WHELAN and ABBY, the daughter and
granddaughter of the now-deceased author of the prophecies, Teds
increasingly desperate efforts take him on a heart-pounding race
against time until he finds himself facing the ultimate disasterand the
ultimate sacrifice.

The
film opens in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1959, where a competition is
held among the students of a new elementary school to celebrate its
opening. The winning plan, from student Lucinda Embry, a seemingly
mental disorder/mentally disturbed girl, is to bury a time capsule
containing the students' drawings of the future to be opened 50 years
later in 2009. She is prevented from finishing her image, which is
actually a series of seemingly random numbers, and goes missing during
the ceremony. Her teacher later finds her in a gym closet, frantically
scratching the remaining numbers into the door.
Fifty years later, the time capsule is opened and the pictures are
handed down to the new generation of students. Caleb, the son of MIT
professor and astrophysics|astrophysicist John Koestler, receives
Lucinda's envelope. Initially dismissing them as random numbers, John
notices a single random number sequence, 911012996, which contains the
date of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks|World Trade Center
attacks as well as the death toll of the attack. Further research leads
John to realise the numbers are a list contain the dates and death
tolls of every major disaster, natural and man made, that has happened
over the past 50 years, with three that have not occurred yet.
When a commercial plane crash kills 81, the legitimacy of the list of
numbers is confirmed and leading John to believe that Lucinda had an
ability to prognosticate since childhood until she died. It is also
revealed through this incident that the numbers contain the coordinates
for every event listed. As his wife died in one of the past events,
John starts to believe his son was chosen to get Lucinda's prophecies.
After Caleb receives a vision of future global catastrophe from a
silent man, John tries to contact the late Lucinda's daughter, Diana,
to gain more information, but is rebuffed. But when John also predicts
the second event, a subway train crash, Diana and her daughter, Abby,
visit John and Caleb, and Diana reveals that her mother foretold of the
date of her death would be on October 19th, which is also within the
list. They investigate Lucinda's old mobile home in the woods,
discovering walls of news clippings of the events and a drawing of
Merkabah|Ezekiel's Wheel. During their investigation, the group
encounters the silent man and three others, who vanish in a flash of
light protruded from the man's mouth when John confronts them. Later
Caleb is found writing numbers very similar to the ones that Lucinda
wrote without realizing what he is doing. This may suggest that those
numbers are predictions for future events. As a result of the
confrontation, Abby is revealed to have been contacted by the "whisper
people".
Initially believing that the last event will kill only 33, John
eventually re-examines the numbers after Diana's mention on how her
mother used to write numbers and letters backward. He discovers that
the final digits are not "33", but actually "EE" written backwards; the
final event is a massive solar flare that will kill "Everyone Else." As
Diana prepares to travel to a system of caves she believes will save
them, John breaks into the school to steal the door Lucinda scratched
the numbers on. At his house, he begins to scrape the paint off the
door, but Diana refuses to wait for him, and leaves with the kids. As
the solar flare approaches, it begins to disrupt cell phone signals,
preventing John from contacting Diana. She is finally able to contact
John through a gas station pay phone, and he tells her that the final
numbers are the coordinates of her mother's house, which he believes is
safe, while the caves won't protect them from the solar flare's
radiation. When panic erupts at the gas station following the
government's activation of the national Emergency Alert System and
announcement of the solar flare, two of the whisper people hijack
Diana's car with the two children. Giving chase in another car, Diana
is hit by a truck trying to run a red light, dying exactly at midnight,
on the very day her mother predicted.
Arriving back at Lucinda's mobile home, John discovers the children are
safe and comfortable in the presence of the whisper people. The whisper
people are revealed to be celestial angel-like beings who invite the
children to escape the destruction "to help everyone start over". At
first, Caleb is very reluctant to go when his father is not invited to
come along; John successfully persuades him to go, saying that they
will be together again eventually. The whisper people leave Earth on
their ship, a massive structure resembling Ezekiel's Wheel, as other
ships also depart Earth. As anarchy reigns in New York City and Boston
John arrives to be with his parents and sister just as the solar flare
strikes Earth and incinerates all life on the planet. Caleb and Abby
are dropped off on an Earth-like planet with at least two moons as the
other ships drop off their passengers. The movie ends as the two
children, dressed in white, run toward a large white tree, possibly
being the fabled Tree of Life.