Knowing: Some Questions

I recently watched the movie “Knowing” and some questions came to mind, so I thought I’d put them out-there. Before reading further, please bear in mind that this post contains some spoilers, so do NOT continue if that will be detrimental to your enjoyment of the movie.

So the movie centres around Randomness and Determinism, i.e., whether what happens in this universe is random or has it been pre-determined. Now obviously, this question is inherently controversial, in that most of the religions, certainly the Abrahamic ones, posit that things are pre-determined.

The movie “Knowing” can be viewed to support either viewpoint

The gist of the movie is that a character, in her young age, writes down a sequence of numbers. This sequence of numbers predicts every major disaster by specifying the date, the death toll and the geographic location (encoded as the latitude and longitude). The events of the movie are set 50 years on, when most of the events predicted by the sequence have already occurred.

The final disaster predicted by the sequence predicts that the disaster would end the world. Everyone would die, except some chosen ones. And indeed, we see in the climactic scenes that two children (and there is implication that several others as well) are transported by some entities to another Earth-like planet with 2 moons and lush fields of wheat, running towards a mystical tree from which flower blossoms are flowing off like snowflakes.

It is the manner in which the chosen children are transported that made me question what the movie seems to be stating.

The children are transported by spaceships that resemble Ezekiel’s Wheel.

NB: Ezekiel’s Wheel is the spherical structure in the bottom-left corner of the above illustration, taken from Wikipedia.

If the children were transported by a theological or metaphysical entity, then there would be no need for some kind of spaceship to do so. They would simply blink and find themselves in their new planet.

On the other hand, if the movie was implying that there was some kind of super-natural, ultra-intelligent, extra-terrestrial race of sentient beings that placed the human race on Earth and knew our actions (much like a programmer would know how a program written by her would work, even before she ran it), then, the movie would indeed need to illustrate that viewpoint the way it did in the movie.

Another question that comes to mind after watching the movie is: is this movie implying something about the source of religions?

There seems to be a suggestion in the movie that events far in the past can seem to be miraculous or metaphysical once they get shrouded by the mists of history. For example, take the account of Adam and Eve are recounted in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Once you peel away the layers, the account states that a male and a female were transported down to a planet.

This movie actually depicts that happening, but more importantly, it seems to imply that such an action does not need to be a divine action—that it can very well be the action of physical entities, albeit super-natural, ultra-intelligent, extra-terrestrial sentient beings.

I would be interested to know what other people thought after watching the movie.