Denice and I watched this movie a couple of days ago. It was a boring night, there was nothing on TV, so I took a little trip down to our local Red Box. Out of a complete lack of the Red Box having anything even remotely interesting, I rented The Knowing.
I expected this movie to suck right from the get go, but I was really surprised. The Knowing was actually very well done. It was much more graphic and had a much better story than I anticipated.
(SPOILER ALERT!)
In The Knowing, John Koestler (Nicholas Cage) comes into possession of a coded message that was buried in a time capsule from 50 years in the past. The code reveals the date and body count of every major disaster in recent history, including three which have yet to occur. Being a physics professor, he is skeptical and believes the message to be a hoax, until he experiences the first of the prophesied events.
And as if a prophetic letter from the past isn’t bizarre enough, the story gets even weirder when mysterious strangers begin appearing to John and his son. The tall men in black, who constantly whisper, appear far away at first, and get closer as the movie progresses. They seem to be trying to warn them, to warn them of something terrible. The warning is made clear when John breaks the code, and discovers that the last disaster is a fiery apocalyptic end to all life on the planet earth.
The mystery men turn out to be aliens, apparently engaged in some kind of mission to save mankind from extinction when massive solar flares from the sun set the entire planet ablaze. All life on planet earth will perish in a fiery inferno, except the handful of ‘chosen’ individuals, who were able to ‘hear the call.’
The aliens do not speak, but instead are completely telepathic. Their ‘call’ or warning, was telepathic also. Those who had evolved to the level of having telepathic capabilities, were chosen to be saved. Everyone else, in the end, was barbecued.
In the ending scene of the movie, John’s son Caleb and his new friend Abby are dropped off by the aliens on an alien world, where they can start the human race over, and John comes to an understanding that there really is ‘meaning’ in the universe, just before he is vaporized by an unfathomable burst of solar radiation.
There are some tie-ins in the movie to the Biblical story of Ezechiel and his vision of a wheel within a wheel. I believe what the movie is trying to get across is that the aliens are the gods and angels of our mythical history, and for what ever reason, they have taken it upon themselves to ensure our future. However, in the end, all but a handful of human beings are saved, but this is all that is required to give us a fresh start on a fresh world.
