Thursday Night at the Movies - Knowing

The Houston Chronicle said if you see only one bad movie this year, make it Knowing. I expect we'll see worse movies this year but it will take some doing. In many ways, this was not a bad movie. The acting was perfectly adequate. If you like Nicholas Cage, you'll like him in this. The special effects were great. The way this movie was bad was the fact that it absolutely made no sense. The entire premise of the movie was negated near the end.

--- SPOILER ALERT ---

If you've seen the trailer (go ahead and watch it again, I'll wait) then you know that the premise of the movie is that a list of disasters was buried in a time capsule 50 years ago and that Cage's son ended up with the list. There are 3 disasters on the list which haven't happened yet but are going to happen in just a few days. Cage manages to be present at the first two, the plane crash and the subway crash. The circled numbers on the list are the dates of the events and the number of people killed. He figures out that the uncircled numbers on the list are the latitude and longitude of the event. The last event has no location but he finally figures out that the EE after the date (instead of a number) means "Everyone Else". There is no location. He does figure out the location but he believes it is where he has to take his son and the granddaughter of the girl who made the list so they will be safe. Safe from what, you ask? Safe from a massive solar flare which is going to wipe the earth clean of life. Did I mention that Cage is an astrophysicist? This whole complicated plot was to get Cage to bring the kids to a certain location so that aliens (yes, that's right, aliens) could rescue them. What happens that negates the whole plot? Cage is too slow to figure out the final location. So the aliens (the kids know them as the 'whisper people') kidnap the kids and bring them there themselves. If that was always an option, why this obtuse mystery that took a stroke of luck for Cage to even recognize? Also, it is clear at the end, that there were other alien ships, presumably rescuing other pairs of children. How many complicated schemes did they hatch to get the kids to the rescue points?