Entertainment

"Knowing" The Future Holds Some Surprises

We've seen Nicolas Cage decipher codes before, a la “National Treasure.”  If there’s one thing the Academy Award-winning actor is good at, it’s bringing an audience inside his mind and letting us see how it works.  In the sci-fi thriller “Knowing”,  Cage plays the role of John Koestler, an astrophysics professor at MIT, who we quickly learn is a grieving widower, conscientiously raising his son Caleb by day and drinking away his sorrows by night. 

Caleb attends an elementary school that is celebrating their fiftieth anniversary by opening a time capsule buried on the grounds since 1959.  In that year, the students had each put a picture they’d drawn of how they thought the future would look, into the capsule.  One troubled little girl, Lucinda Embry, did not draw a picture, but instead, feverishly scribbled row after row of numbers till they filled an entire page.  Caleb is the unenvied recipient of her entry, but when he inadvertently brings the specimen home, his dad late at night takes a closer look.  In a move that’s even speedy for an astrophysicist, he sees a pattern to the numbers, an intricate listing of dates, numbers of casualties, and GPS coordinates for every major disaster of the last fifty years.