Knowing Plot
The film opens in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1959, where a competition is held among the students of a new elementary school to celebrate its opening. The winning plan, from student Lucinda Embry, is to bury a time capsule containing the students' drawings of the future to be opened 50 years later in 2009. She is prevented from finishing her image, which is actually a series of seemingly random numbers, and goes missing during the ceremony. Her teacher later finds her in a gym closet, frantically scratching the remaining numbers into the wood of the door with her hands and begs them to "stop whispering". Fifty years later, the time capsule is opened and the pictures are handed down to the new generation of students. Caleb, the son of MIT professor and astrophysicist John Koestler, receives Lucinda's envelope. While initially dismissing them as random numbers, John accidentally discovers that the numbers have accurately predicted the dates, death tolls, and locations of every major disaster in the last 50 years; three of the events have not yet occurred.
When the first event occurs, a commercial plane crash which kills 81, the legitimacy of the numbers is confirmed. As his wife died in one of the past events, John starts to believe his son was chosen to get Lucinda's prophecies for a reason. After Caleb receives a vision of future global catastrophe from a silent man, John tries to contact the late Lucinda's daughter, Diana, to gain more information, but is rebuffed. But when John also predicted the second event, a collision between two trains on the New York City subway system, killing people on both trains and on the platform, Diana and her daughter, Abby, visit John and Caleb. They investigate Lucinda's old mobile home in the woods, discovering walls of news clippings of the events and a drawing of Ezekiel's Wheel. During their invest..MoreThe film opens in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1959, where a competition is held among the students of a new elementary school to celebrate its opening. The winning plan, from student Lucinda Embry, is to bury a time capsule containing the students' drawings of the future to be opened 50 years later in 2009. She is prevented from finishing her image, which is actually a series of seemingly random numbers, and goes missing during the ceremony. Her teacher later finds her in a gym closet, frantically scratching the remaining numbers into the wood of the door with her hands and begs them to "stop whispering". Fifty years later, the time capsule is opened and the pictures are handed down to the new generation of students. Caleb, the son of MIT professor and astrophysicist John Koestler, receives Lucinda's envelope. While initially dismissing them as random numbers, John accidentally discovers that the numbers have accurately predicted the dates, death tolls, and locations of every major disaster in the last 50 years; three of the events have not yet occurred.
When the first event occurs, a commercial plane crash which kills 81, the legitimacy of the numbers is confirmed. As his wife died in one of the past events, John starts to believe his son was chosen to get Lucinda's prophecies for a reason. After Caleb receives a vision of future global catastrophe from a silent man, John tries to contact the late Lucinda's daughter, Diana, to gain more information, but is rebuffed. But when John also predicted the second event, a collision between two trains on the New York City subway system, killing people on both trains and on the platform, Diana and her daughter, Abby, visit John and Caleb. They investigate Lucinda's old mobile home in the woods, discovering walls of news clippings of the events and a drawing of Ezekiel's Wheel. During their investigation, the group encounters the silent man and three others, who vanish in a flash of light when John confronts them. Later Caleb is found writing numbers very similar to the ones that Lucinda wrote without realizing what he is doing. This may suggest that those numbers are predictions for future events. As a result of the confrontation, Abby is revealed to have been contacted by the "whisper people."
Initially believing that the last event will kill only 33, John eventually re-examines the numbers after Diana's mention on how her daughter used to write numbers and letters backward. He discovers that the final digits are not "33", but actually "EE" written backwards, and the upcoming event is a massive solar flare unlike any other. It will be so strong, it will kill "Everyone Else". As Diana prepares to travel to a system of caves she believes will save them, John breaks into the school to steal the door Lucinda scratched the numbers on. At his house, he begins to scrape the paint off the door, but Diana refuses to wait for him, and leaves with the kids. As the solar flare approaches, it begins to disrupt cell phone signals, preventing John from contacting Diana. She is finally able to contact John through a gas station pay phone, and he tells her that the coordinates are those of her mother's house, which he believes is safe, while the caves won't protect them from the solar flare's radiation. When panic erupts at the gas station following the government's activation of the national Emergency Alert System and the president's announcement of the solar flare, two of the "whisper people" hijack Diana's car with the two children. Giving chase in another car, Diana is killed trying to run a red light, dying exactly at midnight, on the very day her mother predicted.
Arriving back at Lucinda's mobile home, John discovers the children are safe and comfortable in the presence of the "whisper people." The "whisper people" are revealed to be celestial angel-like beings who invite the children to escape the destruction "to help everyone start over." At first, Caleb is very reluctant to go when his father is not invited to come along; John successfully persuades him to go, saying that they will be together again eventually. The group of "whisperers" leave Earth on their "ship," a massive structure resembling Ezekiel's Wheel, as other ships also depart Earth. As anarchy reigns in Boston, John arrives to be with his father, mother, and sister just as the solar flare strikes Earth and kills all life on the planet. In the last scene, Caleb and Abby are dropped off on what appears to be a new Earth (albeit with at least two moons) as the other ships drop off their passengers. The movie ends as the two children, dressed in entirely white clothing, run toward a large white tree, possibly being the Tree of Life.
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