A man standing on a street corner strapped to a sandwich board with "The End is Here" scribbled across it.  A movie critic sitting in front of a keyboard frantically typing a review that will impact two hours of a moviegoers life.  How do these images tie together: Though you know the future, will anyone listen?
 
            It's the end of the world and Nicolas Cage knows it.  During an Elementary school 50th anniversary celebration, a time capsule buried on the first day of classes is unearthed and each student is given a message written by a former student.  Most find half-century-old drawings but M.I.T. Professor John Koestler's (Nicolas Cage) son is given a sequence of numbers which pinpoint the date and location of every major catastrophe in the past fifty years and three which have yet to occur.  This sparks Koestler to not only track down the origins of the list but also decipher whether the list is predicting the end of the world and if he can he stop it.
 
            Known for his dark visions of the future, director Alex Proyas (I, Robot, The Crow) creates a surprisingly entertaining thriller for about an hour and a half.  By filtering the disaster film through a M. Night Shyamalan lens, Proyas heightens the action by adding a layer of creepiness in between each catastrophic event leaving you on the edge of your seat.  But who could foresee that the careening subway car in the second act would foreshadow the movie's eventual derailment.  Without giving away the anti-climactic ending,, let's just say that the plot twist was followed by a collective groan throughout the theater.  Though previously gripped in silence, the audience couldn't have cared less about how or if the film tied up loose ends.
 
            Being what you could term a "believer" I was excited to see Biblical imagery peppered throughout the film as well as the hero's arc dealing with a crisis of faith.  But the moment the rug was pulled out to reveal what I can only term as a perversion of the beliefs that I adhere to, I realized that not only was I offended but the audience was offended.  You could almost hear the inner audience monologue: "You brought us all this way to give us that??  No thanks!"  This drove home the fact that a bad ending is a bad ending no matter what you believe.
 
            The film is rated PG-13 for disaster sequences, disturbing images and brief strong language but don't let the rating fool you.  The disaster sequences are brutal.  True the apocalypse is a dark theme but I am not sure anyone needs to see a man burn to death to get the picture. I give Knowing 1 out of 5 time capsules.  As it states in Ecclesiastes 1:18: "For in much wisdom is much grief," so if you want to avoid grief, avoid Knowing.