“Knowing” may have been given only one pitchfork, but don’t be dissuaded; go see this movie.

It’s hard to describe the reason to see this movie without ruining it. This review contains no spoilers, and you should avoid them at all costs. It’s like going to an Italian restaurant and getting miso soup instead of bread.

And when you order lasagna, they bring you a set of fancy towels.

Nicolas Cage plays astrophysics professor John Koestler, whose life is in shambles years after his wife’s death in a hotel fire.

His cosmologist friend Phil Beckman (Ben Mendelsohn) pesters him at work to start seeing new people.

His son, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury), makes parenting even harder with demands, like vegetarian food and equal treatment. And his sister, Grace (Nadia Townsend), keeps asking him to reconcile with their father who is a pastor.

It’s no wonder that he drinks himself to sleep. At least he gets some reading material when his son brings home a list of numbers from a time capsule from 50 years ago, written by a troubled and presumably psychic girl Lucinda Embry (Lara Robinson).

Mixing heavy drinking with numerology — the idea that numbers and numerical systems influence on human life — he sees a pattern that predicted human catastrophes of the last half-century. Including the date, location and number of deceased.

That list would have been much more useful if it wasn’t buried in a time capsule 50 years ago, as there are only a few left.

Things get even more complicated when he enlists the reluctant help of the psychic girl’s daughter Diana Wayland (Rose Byrne) and granddaughter Abby (Lara Robinson again), and they discover the biggest problem is that there is an end to the numbers.

The subplot with Koestler’s estrangement with his religious family doesn’t feel extraneous, largely due to Cage’s experience playing someone who is depressed and from Nadia Townsend’s small role as Koestler’s sister Grace.

But don’t expect anything special out of the veteran Cage. He’s perfected this world-weary, self-despising and not-athletic action hero. He rarely blows us away — not because he’s bad, but because we’ve seen it before.

Robinson does decently in double duty as a young Lucinda and Abby, but only because her dialogue is robotic to begin with.

The writers and the director must have been confused about who Caleb was, because he has about five different personalities. It’s not so much one person who has different emotions as it is a multitude of characters that have never met each other.

Through the course of the film, Caleb goes full-tilt from intellectual to mournful to emotionless. Then he winds it back to playful and naive.

His performance is parallel to this movie. It’s not hard to imagine that the four writers weren’t collaborating so much as each one worked independently and was replaced by another writer with a different vision.

While the central theme is the purpose of life and the nature of destiny, the writers seemed to have different ideas on what those were, too.

Reach the reporter at cogino@asu.edu.