“Knowing,” starring Nicholas Cage, started out with a great story line, but it continually grew cheesier and the bad acting did not help.

A young girl named Lucinda during the late 1950s was given an assignment by her teacher, along with the rest of the class, to draw a picture about what they thought the future would look like and their pictures would be put into a time capsule.

While the rest of the class was drawing rocket ships and flying cars, the young girl was writing down a series of numbers on her piece of paper that strange voices in her head were telling her. To the teacher it was just random numbers written down by a disturbed child, but when investigated, the numbers were actually dates as Ted Myles (Nicholas Cage) would find.

The numbers weren’t only dates, though. They were dates of catastrophic events, with the death toll and location where it happened. The numbers dated all the way back to the 1950s and ran on into present day where Cage would find the date for the end of the world.

Sounds good, right?

How will Cage prevent the end of the world? Who will believe that he knows when it’s going to happen? It was all great, until it started to unveil that aliens were involved in the movie.

Ted’s son Caleb starts to hear the voices that Lucinda heard, and soon enough those who have been speaking to him show themselves. They make it clear that they are always watching and following Caleb where he goes. While that is going on, Cage is busy trying to figure out how to prevent the world from ending. Plane crashes, car accidents, and subway collisions were all disasters he tried to stop, but the numbers kept playing out without his being able to stop them at all.

He constantly asks, “Why was I given these numbers if I can’t help anyone?” The real reason was to protect his son. All the events led up to the end of life on earth, but some, called “the chosen ones,” were saved to start life again on another planet.

In this movie, the aliens turned out to be the good guys. They were there to save some of us while the other millions burned alive. The ships in the movie were huge, too, but they only carried two children (and two bunnies) that Cage was taking care of in the end. The ending was horrible. It looked like they were trying to make the kids the new Adam and Eve.

I’ll give this movie two stars for the beginning. It was a great idea, but it lost what it had when the plane crashed.