by Benjamin Lomax

Created on: March 03, 2009

With so many science fiction movies coming out this spring, earlier than the usual glut of summer sci-fi blockbusters, do you want to take a chance on another Nicholas Cage riddle-solving race? Well, quite simply you do if you are a fan of these types of movies like National Treasure, Next, or the Da Vinci Code (I know, not Cage, but a similar theme). If you are not a fan of these movies, chances are pretty good you won't like Knowing either.

Releasing March 20, Knowing looks like fun and caters to yet another of the many conspiracy theories that are so popular in this era of doom and gloom. Namely, that through coding series of seemingly random numbers, it is possible to tell the future. The most popular and controversial of these theories is that the Bible is just such a code, and by analyzing the text with numerical references to book and chapter, the future can become clear.

In this case, a young student in 1958 puts a sheet of such numbers in a school time capsule. 50 years later the son of a mathematics professor (Cage) is provided the sheet when the capsule is unearthed. He quickly analyzes the sheet and discovers that it predicts "every major disaster in the last 50 years in perfect sequence". Worse, it predicts several more of increasing severity, the last a global catastrophe. Coincidence? It does not seem so, as the events seem to revolve around the professor and his son Caleb.

What makes this an interesting concept is the vague unease which we all have for numbers in their most basic form. What do they mean? How are they related? Mathematicians are like modern-day sorcerers, working magic with their equations, but for most of us they are forbidding, speaking a different language than ours. So it is easy to presume that they have some higher philosophical meaning that might hint at doom.

National Treasure did a good job of relating to our uncertainty history, the Da Vinci Code our hesitation about religious institutions, so is math next with this movie? I cannot help but think it unlikely that this will be anything more than an eccentric romp with some pseudo-science thrown in. It is pretty clear even from the trailer that there will be a twist featuring the "Whisper men", who will almost certainly prove to be responsible for the disasters as well as the original sheet of numbers.

But if you are expecting a deep plot that makes you think after the movie is over, I am guessing you will not get it here. Cage will vamp and talk at length about how can he possibly deal with this impossible situation, will narrowly dodge disasters for himself and his son, and then ultimately he will figure out who these shadowy figures are and turn the tables on them. Oh, and the end result will have some heavy mathematical angle, as he clearly is the only one who could solve the mystery instead of, say, the police or FBI.

For a bit of fun and a few chills and thrills, Knowing should absolutely fit the bill, but if you want anything more, you'll have to keep waiting...

http://www.knowing-themovie.com/

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