First, the good news. Alex Proyas' new film Knowing is nowhere near as dull as the recent remake of the The Day the Earth Stood Still nor is it as laughably awful as M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening. Now for the bad news. Despite it's hefty ambition, this fusion of science fiction and religious theology never completely gels.

As Knowing opens, a classroom full of enthusiastic grade school students take part in a project that will see them putting together individual messages and storing them away in a time capsule. Most of the children draw illustrations and things of that nature, but one of the students – while in a creepy, unbreakable trance - briskly writes down a massive series of seemingly random numbers. Her message is stored away with all the others. Years later, the time capsule is unearthed by a new classroom full of young, enthusiastic children. Little Caleb Koestler (Chandler Canterbury) receives the strange series of numbers jotted down years prior and while he's bewildered by them, it is his scientific father John (Nicolas Cage) who really becomes fixated by the numerical codes after he discovers they might not be random at all.

Knowing certainly has a Shyamalan vibe going (think Signs, Unbreakable, and the aforementioned The Happening), but it may also remind you a bit of a few other movies that have surfaced in the past few years. John's obsession with numbers is reminiscent of Jim Carey's strange fixation in Joel Schumacher's horrid Number 23. With it's look at religion, science, and the grieving process, Knowing is also a bit reminiscent of Darren Aronofsky's grossly underappreciated The Fountain. Look even closer and you'll see shades of Contact, I Am Legend, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 2001: A Space Odyssey, X-Files, A.I., Deep Impact, and War of the Worlds. Knowing is a sci fi smorgesboard.

Where Knowing really differs from a movie like Signs is in its sheer scope. Shyamalan likes to take world wide phenomenons and filter them through smaller, intimate family portraits. Director Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City, I, Robot) does tell his story through the point of view of a father and son, but he doesn't shy away from showing the bigger picture. This is a pretty massive film and there's certainly plenty of destruction to be found. Plane crashes, subway derailments, car wrecks, etc. Knowing is one bleak movie.

Proyas does an expert job creating a truly uneasy tone. There is an undeniable sense of absolute dread throughout the picture, and when audiences see where it's going, they might be shocked. Unfortunately though, there are too many moments here that don't work. Some moments in the picture (moose on fire) even caused simultaneous giggling–myself included–amongst our sold out crowd . Part of the problem lies in the hands of Nicolas Cage. He can be a powerful actor, but in Knowing, he's in monotone mode. As a man whose lost his faith, Cage never really makes an emotional connection with the audience. He's almost sleep walking through this thing. This renders potentially powerful scenes ineffective. Take for example a key scene between John and his son in the final act of the picture. It's a moment that goes for E.T. The Extra Terrestrial level emotion, but it'll have to settle for Mac and Me level emotion because that's as deep as it gets.

Film goers with strong religious beliefs can rest easy. At the surface, Knowing appears as if it might be a Scientology propaganda film, when in fact, the movie never denounces the existence of God. This is science fiction, but it's also a movie about faith and the belief in a higher power.

Knowing will be a tough film for many audiences to swallow. Some will buy into this strange marriage of religion, science fiction, and end of the world paranoia, while others will have a good laugh and write the whole thing off as a ridiculous conceit. I'm somewhere in the middle. There were certainly elements that didn't work, but ultimately, I still admire Proyas' ambition. Knowing isn't a bad movie, it's just a messy, slightly over the top one.