"Knowing" Too Much

Quite possibly the wackiest movie I have ever seen. It opens in a grade school classroom in 1959, where eager students are drawing pictures that are destined to be sealed up in a time capsule – except one little girl, Lucinda, isn’t drawing pictures at all: she is frantically covering her page with neat rows of numbers. Flash forward fifty years, the time capsule is opened and a boy named Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) takes home Lucinda’s strange writings. This turns out to be a good thing, because Caleb’s dad is John Koestler (Nicolas Cage), an astrophysicist who spends nights pacing his living room, drinking scotch, and mourning the tragic death of his wife; during one of these reveries he takes a look at the mysterious page Caleb brought home, and notices a series of numbers that seem to predict 9/11. Sensing significance, Koestler frantically tries to follow Lucinda’s strange trail, suspecting it warns of some kind of global catastrophe.

From here the film careens down a completely implausible course, with John Koestler roaring around trying to solve the numbers riddle while Caleb stares soulfully about, apparently unperturbed by his father’s growing terror. They find Lucinda’s daughter and granddaughter (this is where Rose Byrne comes in) , providing a kind of love interest thing for both father and son; they encounter strange glowing men who whisper, and there are these shiny black rocks everywhere that seem to have no meaning at all. But in spite of the silliness I enjoyed this movie. It’s fast paced and unpredictable, and not at all serious, and if you accept the premise that a little girl’s crazed scribbling might harbinger the future, the rest of the story makes a kind of nutty sense, except the ending, where it seemed like the writer lost his train of thought and started working on another film. Playing everywhere and making lots of money, as Nic Cage pictures tend to do.