The Movie Knowing- Opinions

SouthCentral

Did you see the movie knowing?? Did you catch the subliminal messages?

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 mentally disturbed girl who is known to freeze while hearing strange whispering voices, 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 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 World Trade Center attacks as well as the death toll of said attack. Further research leads John to realise the numbers are a list contain the dates and death tolls of almost 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 people right in front of John, 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 of an overdose of her medications. It is also revealed through this incident that the numbers contain the latitude and longitude of the 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 for a reason as well as race against time of trying to save the people who are fated to die within these predictions. 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 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.

hamsterbait

The film started VERY promisingly.

Then it started to unravel after the subway crash.

The ultimate disaster should have been something humans could survive by their own efforts, not a Deus Ex Machina. The whole point of the message was that the final one should be believed. If nothing could be done why not just kidnap the children?

So an apocalyptic sunflare did not fit the deal. This is why the aliens appearing at first just did not make sense to me. And why take the children and leave them on another planet with no parents or survival skills?

Neither did the son writing strings of numbers after destruction of earth was assured - what were these warning of? That the Tree of Life on the Noo Planet was deadly nightshade???

As I walked out I spoke to a couple who were also scathing of the ending. "So it was just a bunch of Intergalactic pedophiles."

HB

hamsterbait

The other fantasy is that the Government would issue warnings of such a disaster.

Look at the policy for a major earthquake in LA - just seal off the area until the rioting dies out.

A few years ago an asteroid was spotted coming toward us, it might have hit, but no annoncements were made. Fortunately it just missed us.

So don't expect the caring governments who have devised defence systems ensuring everybody else but them dies, to worry about our survival in such a scenario.

HB

Great 2 see u again Blondie. Love your post...

SouthCentral

"So it was just a bunch of Intergalactic pedophiles."

I never thought of it that way.....I love interchanging thoughts!!!!

Wasanelder Once

Saw it. Liked most of it. Not the ending. I'd wait for DVD if someone had warned me although the plane crash on the big screen was gigantic. W.Once

The Movie Knowing- Opinions

SouthCentral

SouthCentral

hamsterbait

hamsterbait

Wasanelder Once

blondie

SouthCentral

SouthCentral

Wasanelder Once

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