Knowing the future

Spoiler for Knowing and Next below:

I watched Knowing earlier this evening. It's a science fiction film starring Nicholas Cage. It was either this or watching The International. I choose Nicholas Cage because of the 'knowing the future' theme.

In Nicholas Cage's previous movie, Next he can see into the future a few minutes before it happens, hence he can change it just before it happens. Its got a pretty dumb ending. He 'dies' but then wakes up and he's back at the middle of the movie again where he's just lying on his bed playing out all the possibilities before he got out of bed. How dumb is that? The movie ends without even the bad guys getting caught. I felt cheated, like there was supposed to be a sequel but it never happened.

Anyway, I wanted to know what happened at the end of Knowing. From the trailer, I sort of figured it out. Nicholas Cage has a series of numbers that predict the future. In the end, turns out aliens have been sending selected people warnings that the world is about to end. In the finale, the aliens takes his son away but won't let him follow as he wasn't one of the 'chosen one'. Too bad Nicholas, I guess nobody wants you. So he dies in the end when a huge solar flare kills everyone on earth.

Now I feel satisfied that he finally died in the end of a movie. He may have cheated me of a death in Next but he made up for it in Knowning. I did like the theme and the implied message in the end of the movie Knowing. The aliens in the ending are translucent humanoid beings. As they fly up to their spaceship, they have translucent angel wings. They drop the kids of on a strange planet with almost similar earth like atmosphere and ecology, except that it has two moons. In the last scene, the children run towards a large pale white tree in the open of a grassland. This tree is supposed to represent The Tree of Life from the bible.

So in the end, there are a lot of references that aliens are actually God and Angels were aliens interacting with humans. In the end, they came to save selected humans to start over again on another planet. Sort of like conservationists. "oh, look at those poor humans! The solar flare will kill them, lets save some of them. It was such fun watching them on earth".