knowing
KNOWING, a gripping action-thriller of global proportions about a professor who stumbles on terrifying predictions about the futureand sets out to prevent them from coming true. In 1959, as part of the dedication ceremony for a new elementary school, a group of students is asked to draw pictures to be stored in a time capsule. But one mysterious girl fills her sheet of paper with rows of apparently random numbers instead. 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.
