Knowing

I'm going to break with the norm a bit in reviewing Knowing , the new film starring Nicolas Cage.
Yes there will be spoilers, because there's no other way to get around it. But first here's a general review, to be followed by some comments about the film and what happens at the end.
Cage plays John Koestler, a college professor whose son Caleb is given a letter from a time capsule buried at his school 50 years earlier. The letter just comprises a bunch of seemingly random numbers. When Koestler studies them he uncovers a pattern that is predicting disasters and the number of people who will perish in them.
What he can't work out is how they affect him and why Caleb is so involved. His colleague Phil (played by Aussie Ben Mendelsohn with a pretty decent US accent) doesn't believe him even when Koestler is witness to a tragic plane crash predicted.
He seeks out the family of the girl who wrote the numbers in the time capsule letter. He comes across Diana (played by another Aussie Rose Byrne) and her daughter Abby (who looks eerily like the young girl from 50 years ago) in search of answers.
That's enough plot. I was very interested, even after reading a scathing review, as the movie managed to build a bit of suspense surrounding the meaning behind the numbers along with some pretty spectacular disasters. Then it kind of copped out.
It was pretty obvious (to me anyway) that the bulk of the movie was filmed in Melbourne but an overseas audience wouldn't pick it so easily.
You know, it wasn't a terrible film. It was well enough done, the story was good to a point (that I will discuss shortly) and the effects were good. Can't go higher than 6 out of 10 but I can't help but wonder what could have been.


Spoiler alert


OK. So after seeing a frightening scene of the earth being destroyed by fire we start to wonder what role Caleb plays in this. Also, the strange ghostly skinned men who tend to turn up each night continue to be mysterious. It all promises so much.
Then they decide, at a point where you can almost see the fork in the road in the writers' minds, that the strange men are aliens or extra terrestrials of some kind here to start a new world using selected children of which Caleb is one.
At that point I was very disappointed. I thought we were well past copping out with alien storylines and some other conclusion would have been much more satisfying. On the plus side at least no-one saved the world - it was actually destroyed by the sun.
The only alternative summation involves a biblical scenario where God was destroying the Earth but saving a number of chosen children to take to another world and start over again. There was a scene at the end with a large white tree and I wondered if it symbolised the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. There was a biblical reference that pointed in that direction midway through the film. Still, I think it was a cheap way out. That's my thought on it anyway.