I’m a Nicholas Cage fan, but occasionally he does movies so stinky they should be buried or burned. Unfortunately, Knowing is one of these.

There are three things I don’t want to see in my SciFi movies.

• Mysterious beings communicating in overly obscure hints, and clues, and symbols, when they could just tell people what was happening instead.
• Mixing Sunday school lessons with aliens.
• A plot that starts with real world father and son, numbers, patterns, and big questions and ends with [[spoiler alert]] glowy, implausible spaceships and the tree of knowledge in an idyllic alien landscape.

This movie was such a disappointment, that I was actually grateful for the distraction of the really spectacularly grizzly deaths in the disaster scenes.

What are the movie tropes or techniques that signal a movie is not going to be on your thumbs up list?