Made mostly of spare parts, Knowing won’t give any sci-fi genre fans anything awesome or new but is relatively watchable. Director Alex Proyas (I, Robot, The Crow) could have used a budget stimulus to more smoothly synthesise the elements of the film, but overall the supernatural sci-fi thriller comes off like your run-of-the-mill, race against time doomsday extravaganza.

Knowing begins in the 1959 set prologue of Ryne Douglas Pearson’s original story. The film opens at an elementary school where a teacher asks students to draw pictures of how they see the future to include in a time capsule. All the pupils oblige except for Lucinda (Lara Robinson), a creepy looking child who churns out thousands of numbers on the page.

The capsules are opened 50 years later, and Lucinda’s random jottings are picked up by Caleb Koestler (Chandler Canterbury), a troubled teen who is dealing with the recent death of his mother. Caleb’s father John (Cage) is an astrophysics professor at MIT, and is dealing with his wife’s death while attempting to hold on to his relationship with his son.

John spends his nights puzzling over Lucinda’s numbers and eventually concludes, beginning with 9/11/01, the numbers indicate various incidents that involved mass death and suffering. Soon enough, he learns that the remaining numbers refer to more specific information about pending threats in the very near future.

The ominous nature of the numeric scribblings are hard enough for John to believe, let alone convince others of. He seeks answers from the troubled daughter of Lucinda, Diana (Rose Byrne). Diana only strengthens John’s paranoia by introducing him to her daughter (played by Robinson) as she reinforces the imminent threat of the predictions.

The conceptual and emotional strength of Cage’s performance should be enough to carry the film, but the image of him as an MIT professor seems to suppress his more wildly emotive tendencies. He used to be a consistently impressive actor, even making otherwise dumb, macho movies somewhat enjoyable. But in Knowing, Cage does little more than stumble around with his mouth hanging open, barely able to be taken seriously most of the way.

The supporting performances are somewhat more promising, as Byrne pulls off Diana’s perpetual state of distress without annoyance, and Canterbury and Robinson give strong performances as the two kids.

Proyas ensures we see a range of massive disasters, including a plane crash with victims screaming as they burn to death and a wildfire with forest animals also burning to death. The overall effect is an epic montage of disaster and demise, with some dramatic gesture towards cosmic inclusivity. Knowing offers an interesting theory, but it’s all in the service of a greater idea: We must have Faith, with a capital F.