Okay, so this is the deal: Nicolas Cage, in the thriller Knowing, opening this month, is a local historian whose adorable and to-be-put-in-jeopardy little son stumbles across the scribblings of a kid from 50 years earlier, which had been placed in a time capsule and have just been dug up. The scribblings are a couple of pages of strings of numbers, which Cage deciphers as unerring predictions about the date and body count of every major global disaster to come ... and there are a few more yet to unfold.

Thrills! Calendars! Death tolls! Imagine the excitement.

Here's what's confusing me. Knowing is a Hollywood movie starring Nicolas Cage. It'll never be daring enough to actually let the global disasters it promises in its trailer come to pass. Or at least it can't let them happen for good -- it can depict them in a dream sequence or an alternate universe or something, but it has to hit the reset button to ensure the Happy Ending. You don't need to be psychic to predict that Knowing will be all about Our Hero Nic Cage saving the world. So he has to stop those disasters from happening. And he knows they're going to happen because the time capsule scribblings have been right up till now. So how can he stop the inevitable? Or at least we need to ask: How can he stop the inevitable without the movie cheating so much we want to label Knowing a major global disaster?

It's like the bogus "Bible code" meets Next, the bogus "Nic Cage can see into the future" movie from a few years ago.

Small-scale logic doesn't promise to be much of a feature of the film either. Check out this clip:

Never mind that that's the phoniest New York City subway filmic fake out I've ever seen -- ho boy, does the Lafayette Street station not look like that. This is the question: Why does Cage get on the train? If he knows that something awful is going to happen (and the trailer suggests that he knows that it'll be so bad that 81 people will die), then what does he hope to accomplish on the train? Except, maybe, getting himself killed. And then there's this, too: Cage gets on at the Lafayette Street station, and then the train is crashing into the Lafayette Street station. Are wormholes involved here or merely plot holes?

Also -- and no disrespect intended to the 81 fictional people killed by the subway disaster -- but by what stretch of the imagination is a train crash a major global disaster? If that time capsule scribble is getting so nitpicky as to include events in which mere dozens of people are killed (and let's be honest, on the scale of bloodshed in the second half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, this is, unfortunately, nothing) then the scribbles in the time capsule would be encyclopedia length, and Cage would spend years confirming that it got all its predictions correct.

So I guess it could be worse: the movie could be a lot longer than it is.

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MaryAnn Johanson, not a frakkin' Cylon (email me)

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