YMMV / Knowing

• Alternate Character Interpretation: The Strangers' strange interest in children. The possibilities for why they might conceivably be doing what they're doing are endless and impossible to confirm.
  • Alternatively, if one assumes the Strangers are as much bound by You Can't Fight Fate as much as the humans but are able to perceive preordained events (hence the list), then every illogical thing they do actually makes sense, since they are being forced to do these things because they've already seen themselves do them.
• Angst? What Angst?: Abby seems to take the death of her mother remarkably well, when she was only killed while trying to save her daughter from a situation that was caused by the Strangers. This is also completely at odds with their claim that the Strangers "don't want to hurt us", unless she was being very specific about the "us" part.
• Ass Pull: When the strange, scary people showing up to the children and others turn out in the very end to be benevolent aliens (or angels) who are going to take them away and bring them back later to reseed the planet post-Armageddon. Although the benevolent part is debatable given how at odds it is with their behavior.
• Awesome Music: Beethoven’s beautifully ominous "7th Symphony Major, 2nd Movement - Allegretto in A Minor" used around the beginning of the movie and during the end of the world.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Almost everybody is killed as the entire planet is incinerated, but some 30-odd kids survived and went to a wonderful Garden of Eden-esque place! And they're gonna repopulate the human race! Plus, since the aliens only saved a handful of prepubescent children and refused to rescue even one of the most highly-educated adults on the planet, their concern is clearly preserving human DNA, not human culture or civilization. Why? Are they breeding slaves? Cattle? And let's not imagine the mental health of these kids as they grow up.
• Inferred Holocaust: A rare example of one of these occurring in a movie with an actual holocaust. The kids are, in theory, the only survivors, but they are placed on a rural planet with no obvious ability to do anything else.
• Memetic Molester: The Strangers.
• Narm:
  • The Stranger who came up to Caleb's room seems to want him to pull his finger. Also the vision can be seen as unintentionally funny, especially the moose on fire.
  • The plane crash is pretty over the top, but the best part is where an injured passenger runs up to John, screams in his face and runs off again.
  • Apparently the Strangers all swallowed flashlights, as judged by their mouths opening.
  • Right in the middle of the admittedly intense train crash sequence, one can hear a Wilhelm Scream...during a scene that kinda isn't comedic.
  • The Strangers' true forms: Giant alien spoons.
  • "You stay away from us, you hear me?! You want some of this?!" (hits a tree with a baseball bat)
  • John decides to show the old school teacher the mysterious sheet of paper. You wonder if the teacher noticed the whisky stain he left on it.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The disasters we witness. For example, the plane crash. Most films go for the flashy initial crash; this film actually bothered to show the immediate aftermath of such an event: Passengers screaming from inside the wreckage, people running, people on fire, people just walking in shock, people trying to crawl through fire to escape what's left of the cabin, burning bodies scattered about...one shot had a bunch of people running from one of the few intact parts of the plane; you think they're safe, then BOOM!! they're enveloped in flames. And in the middle of this horror show, our protagonist, trying desperately to do what little he can to help, until rescue workers finally pull him away.
    John: I keep seeing their faces...burning...
  • As described in the main page, the subway crash that occurs is horrifying in its own way. John descends into a subway station and spots a suspicious looking character wandering through the crowd of passengers. He bolts upon noticing he's being followed, at which point John gives chase, closely tailed by police officers. When they finally corner the guy in the lead car... it turns out he was just some petty thief stealing DVD's. John can then only watch in horror as an oncoming subway train derails on a switch, bounces off the wall and is sent tumbling into the station, mowing the crowd down like flies on a windshield and demolishing the stopped train and the station structure. When the chaos finally subsides, all you can hear is the wailing of the mother and baby that John somehow managed to save from the crash, surrounded by the echoes of the wrecked subway cars falling apart around them...
    John: Move back! MOVE BACK!
  • The Reveal of what "EE" stands for: Everyone Else.
  • This is capped by the final disaster - the killer flare, though it's not as high-octane as the earlier, personal disasters, the lead-up is incredibly creepy: The glowing night sky and lighting storms, the brown aurora borealis in broad daylight the following day, the sun getting brighter and brighter, the riots and panic, useless EBS alerts over the TV and radio. When the final firestorm comes, it's incredibly fast; nobody, including the protagonist, suffers long once it hits. Perhaps the worst part isn't the depiction of the actual firestorm, but the atmosphere being blown away. If anything survives the scouring by fire, there won't be any atmosphere left to support life. No, the caves wouldn't have saved them.
  • The filmmakers accidentally (?) showed an accurate depiction of a slightly less apocalyptic but just as nightmare-inducing disaster: A major impact of a comet or large asteroid. The creepy lead-up would be identical post-impact, and the brown aurora, EMP effects, the firestorm and even the atmosphere being blown away all represent what would be seen outside the immediate impact zone.
  • The vision Caleb sees the entire planet on fire, herds of animals fleeing in panic as they burn alive. Holy freaking hell.
• Paranoia Fuel: The people shaped things watching the kids. Never mind they're supposed to symbolize angels. They are creepy!
• Retroactive Recognition: Liam Hemsworth appears in a single scene as one of John's students; in fact, it was his first movie role.
• Signature Scene: The plane crash.
• So Bad, It's Good: This is one of those enjoyably terrible movies that only someone like Nicolas Cage can carry.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The people suffering in the plane crash.
  • Diana's death. It's not only the fact that she died in such a common manner, but that it happened when she was chasing after someone who had taken her daughter, and that she had died without ever seeing her again.
  • Perhaps the worst one is John laying on the ground for hours after his son was taken away.

• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The film's entire gimmick is that John knows when accidents are going to occur before they occur, and was the reasons audiences came to see the movie. So when that ability and everything he does with it over the course of the movie turns out to be completely and utterly pointless and indeed, superfluous to the ACTUAL main plot of the movie, it leaves a bit of a sour taste in the viewer's mouth.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Even all the Narm and Narm Charm (and, of course, Nicolas Cage) is bittersweet at best when you remember that this is a film about Developing Doomed Characters and Failure Is the Only Option. But hey — at least all those kids get to start-over on a new world, right? Well, not so fast; as they get older, many of them are likely to experience depression and/or even be Driven to Suicide over the memories of losing all their loved ones.
• Toy Ship: Caleb and Abby. Even the whisperers agree.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The plane crash and the solar flare both look awesome.

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