Alex Proyas showed an extended trailer for his upcoming thriller Knowing, which just finished shooting. The footage begins with a young girl standing in a school yard looking up at the sky. A teacher calls everyone inside, but Lucinda doesn’t move. Title card: Lexington, Massachusetts 1959. The teacher instructs the kids to draw pictures of what they think the future will look like. The drawings will be opened in 50 years. Lucinda’s teacher scolds her for filling her sheet with numbers instead of a traditional drawing.

Cut to 50 years later, the drawings are uncovered in the opening of the time capsule. Young Caleb, played by Chandler Canterbury, takes the numbered letter home to his father Ted Myles, played by Nic Cage. Myles lectures his kid for bringing it home. Later he starts figuring out the code, matching the dates to major disasters to the last 50 years and tomorrow somewhere on the planet 81 people will die. Then it cuts to the scene we saw in the trailer where Cage is stuck in traffic. He gets out of his car and asks a police officer if everything is okay. The police tells him only a couple people were injured. And just then a plane comes crashing down.  Cage runs into the wreckage in over the top fashion. A news reporter confirms that 81 people died.

Then we get a fast cut montage of cage at some other tragic event in the city with people running. Shots of cage running out of a building.

“What happens when the numbers run out?”

It was also revealed at the panel that Cage’s character has lost faith in the idea that there is a reason for everything happening.  But he ends up finding meaning in the chaos. I’ll wait for DVD.