Here's something to try:

1) Get a random number sheet (they're available all over the internet), the more numbers, the better. If you can't find one, copy down as many numbers of the number pi that will fit on a piece of paper (don't care about the lone decimal place).

2) Look for a specific date. Try looking for your birthday, the day you started your first job, your wedding anniversary, whatever. It doesn't matter if you put the day before the month, or the year before the day: just find any date within the mass of numbers you have on that piece of paper. If you can't find a date you can relate to, just find a sequence of numbers that could fit as a date. When you find one, circle it. If you find a date on two separate lines, skip it. Repeat this until you find all the dates in the mass of numbers you've assembled.

3) Look at the numbers that come after the circled date. Do any of those numbers mean anything to you? Did something happen that many times? Did those numbers appear somewhere on that day? If they did, circle them. If they don't, circle a random amount of numbers after the date and go onto the next one. Repeat this until all the dates have some number circled after them.

4) Look at all the uncircled numbers. Ponder them. Take a drink if you wish. Make up a reason as to how they fit into the rest of the "system".

Congratulations! You've made a Nicholas Cage conspiracy machine! Be as paranoid as you please!

For those that don't know, these steps are the conspiracy behind "Knowing". A girl writes numbers down on a sheet of paper, the numbers go into a time capsule, fifty years later the time capsule is unearthed, Nicky gets a hold of it... you know the rest.

But that's what I appreciate about the film. Nicky Cage is playing a drunken widower who just had his world fall apart. His house looks like it could be declared condemned, his son is slipping away from him, his friend is pressuring and guilt-tripping him into going out with a relative of his and he has to keep convincing himself that every single event that happens within this universe is completely random and that all is chaos... if there was anyone who in a moment of late-night drunken inspiration would find meaning in a huge mass of numbers, it would be Nicholas Cage's character. If this movie was treated like the movie "Special", I think it would be great. Nicholas Cage would play an increasingly incoherent babbling madman whose only solace is booze and the sheet of numbers he desperately insists is the last warning humanity has before the world goes kablooey. Unfortunately, "Knowing" doesn't do this.

Instead, we find out that Nicky Cage is right, the world is actually coming to an end and each passing minute of the movie becomes more laughably stupid than the last. It comes to the explanation of how all life on Earth is going to be destroyed... and I couldn't stop giggling. Then comes the "twist" of the film, and the giggles became chuckles. And then comes the climax where everything comes together, and for a brief second I stared at the screen in awe, and then giggled uncontrollably as the Earth was destroyed, much like the song "We'll Meet Again" plays over the nuclear armageddon in Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove".

"Knowing" is a terrible, terrible movie. When I thought about what the movie was saying, I was offended. When I played over the plot in my head, I was baffled at the idiocy. When I looked at Nicholas Cage's performance, I couldn't believe he was the same actor from "The Rock" with Sean Connery. The effects are brilliant, but the movie is complete and utter bullshit. It is a terrible movie that no person should pay to see.

And yet, why do I want to see it again?

[Edit]: I realize that revealing that the world is destroyed at the end of the movie may be considered a spoiler, but for all intents and purposes, it is a rather minor spoiler. Simply put, when all the stupidity and idiocy are combined into a movie such as this, armageddon is inevitable because it is the only ending that would make sense. However, I would say that "Dr. Strangelove" did it much better, and I apologize to all film lovers and critics for mentioning Kubrick's masterpiece with a piece of schmutz like "Knowing" in the same sentence.