The problem with movies like “Knowing” is that they eventually have to explain themselves. Generally, the explanations are not nearly as fun as all the weird stuff that precedes them.

That noted, this Nicolas Cage vehicle is a moderately watchable supernatural science-fiction thriller that sells itself through earnestness if not logic.

The movie begins with a time-capsule project in an elementary school in 1959. The teacher assigns students to draw their ideas of the future, expecting rockets and robots and such. One little girl, however, furiously scribbles a sequence of numbers.

Jump forward 50 years to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology classroom of astrophysics professor John Koestler (Cage). John is addressing two theories of the universe: randomness, which maintains events are accidental; and determinism, which argues there is a reason for everything that happens. Coincidence versus design, if you will.

John lines up on the side of randomness. He lost his wife in a fire and he’s estranged from his clergyman father over a difference in beliefs. He can’t fathom a purpose behind his wife’s death. John’s one anchor is his young son, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury). Caleb, too, is grieving the family’s loss and there’s an us-against-the-world tone to the relationship between the father and son.

John’s world is rocked when the time capsule is opened and Caleb brings home the mysterious sheet of numbers.

Spending his typical night of drinking himself into oblivion, John notices a series in the sequence that seems to refer to the horrific events of the attack on New York’s World Trade Center. Intrigued, he jumps on the computer and finds that all the numbers predict major disasters that have occurred in the last 50 years and that there are still three more to come.

This puts Cage, the actor, in his trademark unhinged and possessed mode. John is now a convert to determinism and he tracks down the daughter and granddaughter of the numbers-obsessed little girl of long ago.

Her grown daughter (Rose Byrne) understandably wants nothing to do with this apparent lunatic but events prove him credible. Meanwhile, strange men in black stalk the two families and creep out everyone but the kids.

Director Alex Proyas does his best with a script by committee that teeters between the “Book of Revelations” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and throws in the “Book of Ezekiel” as well. Late to the party comes John’s eureka moment, a scientific discovery to which he should have paid more attention but that’s another script problem.

Cage is the true mystery here. His recent movies are pitched to be commercial but he seems to be a throwback to the Actor’s Studio and Off-Broadway, a retro hep cat with the DNA of Brando, Cliff and Dean pulsing in his veins.

Here’s hoping the “Leaving Las Vegas” Nicolas Cage doesn’t do a Mickey Rourke before he again gets his acting groove on.