Knowing, directed by Alex Proyas, begins when an elementary school in Massachusetts deposits a time capsule with envelopes containing pictures drawn by its pupils. Fifty years later, the capsule is opened, but one envelope has numbers. The pupil who opens the capsule is Caleb Koestler (played by Chandler Canterbury), whose father John (played by Nicholas Cage) is an astrophysics professor at MIT. When John tries to decode the numbers, he discovers that they indicate dates, latitude and longitude coordinates, and numbers of persons dying there on those dates, including 9/11. The numbers end at three dates in the future. John is caught up in traffic on the first date and seeks to warn those who might be affected on the second date but is unsuccessful. The third date is of an event in which the sun penetrates the earth’s ozone, and the death of all life on the planet is imminent. At the end of the film, Caleb and his girlfriend (played by Lara Robinson) have an opportunity to be saved. However, the film disappointingly misses an opportunity to make the point that continued burning of fossil fuels, producing CO2, is indeed tearing at the ozone layer. That theme was the basis for the highly unrealistic The Day After Tomorrow (2004). MH