Disaster and the impending end of the world are imminent in the latest dramatic thriller from I, Robot director Alex Proyas. It is an exciting and suspenseful ride through mathematical codes, secret whispers, and impending doom that in the end deals with the exact question indicated by the name of the film, Knowing. From the very beginning scene it is apparent that this film is more than just another action flick with a good mystery behind it. It is a commentary on life on this planet and whether or not there is any way to truly know the future.

The film opens on a playground full of young students in 1959 Massachusetts, focusing on one child in particular, Lucinda Embry. She is odd, outcast, and shunned by her classmates. She has an idea, though, chosen by the school administration, to celebrate the grand opening of the school by creating a time capsule. Each child will draw a picture of what they believe the future will look like and place it in the time capsule. In fifty years, or 2009, the capsule will be retrieved and opened, and a new group of kids will see what children from the past thought their lives would look like.

As each child draws pictures of spaceships, rockets, and robots, Lucinda is hard at work at something very different. She writes numbers, thousands of numbers, one right after the other, with no apparent purpose or relation. There is no explanation offered for the numbers and as her teacher seizes her paper suddenly, Lucinda looks on, mysteriously petrified at what this interruption has caused.

Jump ahead fifty years to John (a college professor with a severe drinking problem due to the recent, sudden death of his wife) and his young son, Caleb. Despite John's best efforts to be a good dad and be there for his son, Caleb still sharply feels the pain of his mother's absence. John attempts to reassure Caleb that someday he will be with his mother and they will all be together again in some sort of life after the present. "But you don't believe in heaven," Caleb points out, to which John replies, "Well, there's no way to know for sure." This is the beginning of John's journey to the truth of whether or not you can truly know anything in life, such as when you are going to die, how you are going to die, and if there is an afterlife.

As a professor of astrophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, John has a mindset deeply rooted in the sciences and, as many scientists do, questions whether or not there is a purpose in the Universe. He asks his students early on what they believe: is there an intelligent design and/or designer behind all the chaos in the universe? Or did random stuff just coincidentally happen and continue happen, resulting in the world being the way it is and things occurring the way they do. John makes it clear that he believes random stuff just happens.

This belief is about to be severely shaken, though, when "coincidentally" Caleb receives Lucinda's message from the time capsule when it is unearthed. When John looks more closely at the seemingly random numbers, a sequence and pattern begin to emerge. The numbers appear to be a scheme that foretells the exact day and location of every major world disaster that has ever occurred. This sends John's head spinning with incredulity and unbelief. Is it really possible for someone to know and predict the future in this way?

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