Would Knowing Really Help?

I'm a great fan of film, and I love to find links between films, and between the themes of films and the general cultural goings-on in the world.

Recently, I was introduced to the film, Knowing, starring Nicolas Cage. I haven't been a great fan of his, but recently I can't help but admit that he has appeared in some fantastic films.

In a City Of Angels, a remake of the Wim Wender's modern classic Wings Of Desire, he plays an Angel watching over the lives of contemporary Los Angeles residents, and he falls in love with Meg Ryan, a heart surgeon. Sufficiently so that the Angel he is decides to become a mortal, so that he can fully experience his love for the woman he is smitten with.

As a remake, it is fairly close to the original, in that all of the angels still hang around in the central reference library during the day. And they listen constantly to the worries and concerns of the human residents of the city.

It is definitely a Hollywood remake of a European film, but it is a good copy. I suppose it is one of the films that has begun to change my overall perspective on Nicolas Cage.

I was recently introduced to the film Knowing, in which Nicolas Cage is the bereaved father, the son of a Preacher that has no faith. His son has a strong sense of faith, and although not deaf, he has poor hearing because he hears the constant chatter of voices in his head.

His father is a Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of technology, and has little time for faith, especially after having lost his wife in a tragic hotel fire when she was away on business.

The plot revolves around the burial of a time capsule, and the coincidence of his own son receiving a 50 year old series of apparently random numbers, that very quickly the scientific minded Professor at MIT discovers to relate to every major disaster on the American continent during the past 50 years. Including the fire that killed his wife.

There are additional numbers that at first seem to have no meaning, but when he is present at an aeroplane crash in which 58 people die, right before his eyes, he realises that the unexplained numbers relate precisely to the GPS location of each incident of major death tolls.

Right from the outset, it is clear that the film is an exploration of the difference between randomness, and determinism. Whether or not there is some purpose to the world, and in the course of the film the father's sense of meaninglessness is thoroughly questioned, until finally he is reconciled with his Minister father.

It becomes an unravelling of a strange truth in the predictive nature of the little girl that placed the numbers in the Time capsule, and it suddenly becomes clear that she has foreseen the end of everything, to be caused by a sudden solar flare.

The destruction of the ozone layer by this solar storm will mean the end of the human race, if it were not for the strange rescue of a few young faithful, including as it turns out his own son.

Leaving aside whatever religious convictions anyone might have, it is a compelling story. A kind of ecological thriller, but one that I did not previously think much about in terms of truth and reality.

And then, today I have just seen a Horizon documentary about solar storms, and the genuine threat that they pose to the way of life that we lead in its dependence upon technology. Technology that is exceptionally vulnerable to the destructive effects of solar storms.

As we have become so dependent upon electricity and technology, so we have become vulnerable to the sudden removal of this by the unpredictable nature of solar storms.

Suddenly, a Hollywood end of the world film seems less of a fiction, and more of a warning.

Whether or not there might be a happy ending on another world through the intervention of a race of Angels, is almost beside the point.

The world in which we live is finely balanced on a Fulcrum, so little would have to change for life to have become impossible on this planet, and one wonders if perhaps we should not live as if the world is an unchanging, forever fact. That we are not beyond the possibility of being snuffed out.