Vacation Assignment - New Film Review

Over the Spring Break I was able to see the movie Knowing, starring Nicholas Cage.

This movie was a predictable tale about a man (Cage) who discovers a secret number code in a time capsule and discovers that it holds the secret to the ending of the world.

Nicholas Cage gave a memorable performance as  John Koestler, recently widowed father to Caleb Koestler. When Caleb's grade school class decides to open a time capsule buried in the ground for 50 years, Caleb's gets ahold of a piece of paper containing a sequence of numbers.  While examining this piece of paper, John discovers that each number sequence relates to a time, date, longitude, latitude and amount of people who died in a tragic accident over the last 50 years. Meanwhile, Caleb is being visited nightly by strange alien voices and creepy whispers from an unknown source in the beyond.  John decides to seek out the help from the daughter of the girl who wrote the numbers 50 years ago, Diana. They soon discover that as the numbers on the paper run out, so does their time left on earth.

This movie is relatively suspenseful and has a strange twist at the end, although I have to admit, it was a little hard to concentrate on the overall theme because you were too busy trying to understand what the purpose of the alien whisper people is.  The effects are nice, but the plot lacks density. The acting was as good as anyone can expect Nicholas Cage's acting to be, but as he ages, his film rolls become redundant.  Rose Byrne gives a good performance and is able to keep the plot moving forward. However, the real stars of this film were Chandler Canterbury (Caleb) and Lara Robinson (Abby, Diana's daughter). Although very young, these small actors give a spectacular performance and really keep you involved in the film.   Hopefully we will be seeing a lot more of these talented young stars in films to come.  While the plot has some major gaps (ie. how exactly is it that no one was able to predict the ending of the world sooner than two days in advance??) the movie on the whole is entertaining and worth seeing, at least once.