Knowing is a frustrating film. It begins somewhere near the territory of The Number 23 and various “Bible Code"-style prophecies when astrophysicist John Koestler (Nicolas Cage) sees patterns and predictions of calamity in a list of numbers written by a schoolgirl fifty years previous. It then shifts abruptly into Signs territory, with no less than two conversations about whether the events of our lives are shaped by design or by sheer chance.

Elements from director Alex Proyas’s own Dark City rear their heads in the form of pale, menacing men in black (the main one is even billed as “The Stranger,” as the alien villains in Dark City were known.) From there, Knowing lurches abruptly onto a cosmic scale only obliquely hinted at in the movie’s first half. In trying to be so many things, Knowing ultimately becomes nothing.

Much of the fault lies with John and the man portraying him. Cage has engendered no small amount of ill will for his, ahem, reckless choice of roles over the past 10 years, but nonetheless I can never automatically count him out; his dextrous work in Matchstick Men, The Weather Man and Lord of War hit three precise (and three distinct) notes.

Not here. John is a cipher, constructed to be a Man of Science (astrophysicist) who has categorically rejected the idea of purpose and reason in the universe (estranged father is a pastor; wife died in a fire the year before), a position usually taken by characters in these kinds of movies so they can be soundly refuted by the end of the first act. Beyond this aspect, little about John could be said with any certainty.

And so, the refutation of John’s defining characteristic: a 50-year-old time capsule is dug up at his son Caleb’s (Chandler Canterbury) elementary school, and John finds the curious list of numbers in the capsule letter given to Caleb. The numbers appear to be dates and locations for all major disasters between 1959 and now—from tsunamis and 9/11 to your more pedestrian plane crashes and hotel fires. If the body count rates a high two-figures or more, it’s in there. Bigger problem: there are a few dates left, all within the next week or so. (One of the film’s many problems is a muddied passage of time.)

John is naturally skeptical, until a plane crashes almost directly in front of him—just as the number list told him it would. What follows is one of the more disturbing plane crash sequences ever committed to film; that Knowing can get away with this sequence (and the subway crash sequence later) and still maintain a PG-13 rating is a testament to how much muscle a major studio can exert on the MPAA.

More disasters pile up, John seeks out the note-writer’s daughter Diana (Rose Byrne) and granddaughter Abby (Lara Robinson), and pale men in black coats lurk on the fringes with a watchful eye on the younger pair. What begins mostly weird becomes flat-out cosmic in its implications, and Knowing wavers between supernatural/religious and science-fiction explanations until almost the very end.

The concept and execution are loopy enough on their own, but the weird logic gaps and unfulfilled setups pile up so swiftly they clutter the movie’s already troubled vision. Early on, we meet John’s sister Grace (Nadia Townsend), apparently a nurse or a doctor. A few hours after the plane crash, which occurred not but a few miles away and saw 81 dead and countless more injured, Grace is waiting at John’s house, waiting for him to come home. Couldn’t think of anything better to do with your time, Grace?

Or consider young Caleb, who is seized with the urge to jot out his own long string of numbered predictions. Consider also that he is doing so approximately one day before the largest catastrophe at all, one that would presumably render all further predictions moot. What is he jotting down, exactly? Is he just repeating the old predictions for fun? And given the scope of that final prediction, the previous ones seem… small, somehow. Even quaint. Why did the whispering voices responsible for them even bother?

But the biggest oversight may be John, who remains curiously unaffected by the many horrible things he bears witness to. Hints at deeper trauma are made, though John, portrayed as having an open and honest relationship with his son, actively hides everything that happens from Caleb. John knows calamity is coming and can only bear witness to it, but what can you do, right? I couldn’t help but think of 12 Monkeys and its superior handling of the implications of the “Cassandra complex”—the gift of prophecy and the curse of disbelief. Add that to the list of movies Knowing invokes to weaken itself.

But no, despite feeble protests to the contrary, Knowing doesn’t have much to say about the psychology of catastrophe. It is, in fact, hard to figure out what Knowing has to say about anything. This is the kind of science fiction whose ultimate purpose is to say “wouldn’t it be cool if…?”

And that’s fair enough; there’s certainly a place for that. But there’s a question of taste at work here. Is “wouldn’t it be cool if” legitimate cause to invoke 9/11? Is it grounds enough to graphically portray the violent deaths of dozens or hundreds of people? At what point does purely speculative fiction cross the line into something distasteful?

I ask not because I believe such heavy material should never be used; I ask because I believe such heavy material should only be used if you have a damn good reason for doing so. But there is nothing to be gained from Knowing, no catharsis or revelation, no lessons to be learned. It’s a closed circuit that proposes that all of its characters are helpless to stop anything that happens, and then sets out to “prove” that thesis right.

As a display of style, you could do worse. Proyas’s Dark City is one of the best and most original films of the ‘90s, one that did everything The Matrix did, only with half the action and twice as much smarts… and a full year earlier, besides. Proyas shows he still has a flair for creating bold visions, and his closing shots are reminiscent of science fiction paperback covers—a refreshingly daring approach in a non-franchise science fiction film.

But in service to what? Knowing is a waste of Proyas’s talent, mediocre and at times tawdry. The movie is nothing but an exercise in trauma and “what if?” And for a thinking brain, not much of one.