"Knowing." Dumbest. Movie. Ever.

Mark and I did the redbox thing the other night for the first time and we picked up "Knowing." I knew this was risky since half of Nicholas Cage's movies are good and the other half make starving children in Africa weep at their awfulness. Nonetheless, we got it and settled in for a nice evening of movie watching.

SPOILER ALERT (although, really, if any of you go see this movie after I finish telling you how awful it is than I am going to have to punch you in the face):

The movie starts out in 1959 at an elementary school dedication. This creepy little girl named Lucinda comes up with the idea to bury a time capsule and all the children are supposed to draw a picture of what they think the future will look like. Instead of drawing a picture, Lucinda covers a page with a sequence of numbers and the teacher has to take the page away from her before she is finished. Then Lucinda gets lost and the teacher finds her in a closet at the school scratching numbers on the back of the door. So far so good.

Fast forward 50 years and Nic Cage's kid gets Lucinda's page when they open the time capsule and he starts hearing people whispering. Kinda creepy. Nic Cage is conveniently an astrophysicist who teaches at MIT and doesn't believe that anything happens for a reason. He thinks everything is random, and conveniently, does not believe in God. Also, conveniently, his father is a pastor and they are estranged. He figures out the numbers are dates of a disaster, number of people killed and latitude and longitude of said disaster. There are only 3 disasters left.

He spends the next half hour trying to stop the disasters and it is actually pretty cool. A plane crashes and people stumble around on fire screaming. A train derails and we get to watch it crush a hundred people. Very entertaining. It seems like the rest of the movie will be fairly promising. Nic's son keeps being visited by these creepy guys dressed in black and he starts having visions of things on fire. Cool, right. So wrong.

Turns out, the last date on the list is the end of the world and everyone is going to die. The sun is going to vaporize everything. They start talking about Bible prophesies and Ezekial. Here it starts to get less cool. 1. Nobody knows when the end of the world will be. 2. Isn't this a little convenient since Nic Cage's character doesn't believe in God.

The rest of the movie consists of Nic Cage and this woman he picked up (cause you have to have a love interest even if they don't get to any loving) trying to figure out where they can go to escape the burning of the earth. In the end he gets his son and her daughter to this place that is supposed to be safe and the men dressed in black show up. Here is where it gets really stupid. The creepy guys are aliens. Not angels. Not demons. Not the four horseman of the Apocalypse. Aliens. They take the two kids up in their space ship and deposit them on a new world along with a pair of bunnies so they can start all over. Nic Cage and the rest of the world, including his pastor father are incinerated by the rays of the sun.

Now I want my dollar and the last two hours of my life back.

Peace. 90210 is on and Brandon and Donna are just about to blow the whistle on a sweatshop Steve's father is involved with!