The Burr in the Burbs

I’ve always liked Nicolas Cage.  He’s very talented but I must say that his career has many highs and lows.  Our family really liked the National Treasure pics.  2007′s Ghost Rider was really low.  But his latest film, Knowing, is thankfully on the higher end of the spectrum.  Not that it’s incredibly original.  Just another supernatural, sci-fi,  horror, thriller with scary children at the center.  I don’t think it lasted long in the theaters.  Here is a link to the trailer if you don’t remember hearing about it.  But don’t watch the preview if you don’t want major plot elements to be spoiled for you.

Without getting too detailed, the story begins in 1959 at an elementary school celebrating its grand opening by assembling and burying a time capsule to be opened fifty years hence.  The children are assigned to draw pictures of what they imagine the future to look like.  Along with the predictable crayon masterpieces of rocket-ships and robots, one spooky little girl, Lucinda, turns in a page full of numbers.  Most of the children think of the future only in terms of technological progress but Lucinda is coming from a different perspective entirely.  Just how different will be revealed.

Skipping to today, Cage is a widowed father who teaches astrophysics at MIT and ponders philosophical questions such as: Is there any purpose to the universe or is everything merely random?  On the fiftieth anniversary of his son’s school, they open the time capsule and distribute the contents to the kids.  Cage’s son gets Lucinda’s page full of digits.  Things start to get creepy when Cage begins to notice order in the seemingly random numbers.

Cage plays a man of science who has lost his religious faith.  He doesn’t believe in things like heaven and God, even though his own father is a pastor.  But his reliance on reason is shaken when it appears that Lucinda’s numbers are prophetic in nature.  And they seem to foretell disasters over the course of the fifty years and even into the near future.

It is usually the case that true prophets are thought to be mad or worse.  And maybe sometimes they are.  One man’s madness is another man’s enlightenment.  Cage’s scientist thinks he might be going mad too, when his credo (“s*** just happens“) is brought face to face with an obvious higher intelligence that orders events.

There’s more to tell but I’ll let you be surprised.  Many viewers will see the film as an affirmation of religious belief.  Others might point out that the film could suggest a natural explanation for the looming Higher Power.

One of the values of engaging with stories is that they tell you so much about the storytellers.  Let it be known that I was not therefore terribly surprised when I learned from Peter Chattaway that the company which owns the film is called Ezekiel Films and one of the screenwriters is a Christian.