The last shot of Knowing deserves its own shelf in the sci-fi kitsch hall of fame; suffice it to say that somewhere, Erik Von Daniken is smiling. But even prior to this canonical WTF, Alex Proyas’ film merits consideration as the silliest apocalyptic pot-boiler of all time, edging out even M. Night Shymalan’s The Happening, with which it shares a certain sense of cosmic determinism: the notion that the Universe is, in fact, talking to you.  

As the film opens, a widowed, alcoholic, existentially stymied astrophysics professor (Nicolas Cage, of course) has stumbled across a fifty-year old piece of paper containing a seemingly random numerical sequence. After drunken whiteboard calculations, he discovers that it’s actually a codified inventory of every major disaster of the past 50 years – including a few impending catastrophes.

To cite the logical inconsistencies in this set-up would be futile, largely because the script keeps creating new ones. By the time a group of Human-League looking aliens start popping up to telepathically torment Cage’s son with nightmare visions of a flaming moose (seriously!) you might start wishing for something to bite down on. The convulsive lunacy is interrupted only by a calculated moment in which Cage, having narrowly survived a subway crash in NYC (one of several show-offy yet blurred-out CGI FX interludes), emerges from the tunnel shell-shocked and dusted with ash. This attempt to evoke 9/11 imagery is old-hat after War of the Worlds and Cloverfield, but its familiarity doesn’t make it any less risible.