Knowing

Knowing - Directed by Alex Proyas, starring Nicolas Cage and Rose Byrne, rated PG-13

[quote][quote]Even with the bad acting, this visually jarring sci-fi film really struck a chord with me. And Chigurh enjoys disaster sequences.
 [/quote]   
 
Knowing, the latest film from Alex Proyas (The Crow, I, Robot) almost delves into M. Night Shyamalan territory (it does feature a main character much like Mel Gibson’s character from Signs) but it saves itself with an entertaining science fiction plot and some of the best disaster sequences I have ever seen.
 
 
 
 
The story starts off in an elementary school in 1959 with a class drawing pictures of what the future might look like for a time capsule. But one troubled girl, Lucinda, writes a series of mysterious numbers instead. Cut to the present when John Koestler (Nicolas Cage) obtains the paper from his son. Koestler discovers that the numbers are actually dates and death tolls of disasters from 1959 to the present, save for three more events that Koestler must investigate and, of course, see for himself.


Koestler has to see the events so that we, the audience, can witness them as well. Proyas could’ve cut to these events and have Koestler watch them on the news, but by placing the character in the events, it adds a bit of realism to each event. I don’t want to give away what the disasters are since the shock of the first one is so great, but I will say that Proyas knows how to handle a massive, CG-filled catastrophe. He uses quick zooms and a shaking effect that allows the viewer to see everything clearly, but not focus on it enough to see the rough edges of computer effects. It also helps that the sound becomes blaring at each event, adding to the chaos of it.


The disasters themselves are enough to warrant the price of admission for this film and that’s important because this film features some awful acting and plenty of awkward dialogue. Cage does a good job of looking completely dumbstruck during the action scenes, but he’s useless when it comes to showing emotion. The character is supposed to be disconnected due to the death of his wife, but Cage takes it too far. Koestler’s son is supposed to be extremely important to him, but Cage makes each scene between father and son so awkward that you never get the sense that these two even know each other. And the alcoholic aspect of his character was unnecessary, unless it was placed there to use as an excuse for Cage being so wooden in each scene. When you throw Rose Byrne into the mix as Lucinda’s daughter it gets bad…The Happening bad. Byrne, who does a great job in her TV series Damages, is miscast here. She is even less convincing than Cage when it comes to parenting and when she starts yelling in the third act she becomes laughably bad.


The finale of this film might rub people the wrong way as well. It turns into a full bore science-fiction film with biblical connotations in the end and those elements were not necessarily there in the first two acts. There are hints to it, of course, like Koestler’s lack of faith and the mysterious people that stand in the background of many scenes and seem to be stalking Koestler and his son, but I think some people will be surprised with how far into the sci-fi genre this movie goes. I liked it, though. Proyas, who also directed the excellent Dark City (check it out if you haven’t seen it, and keep in mind that it came out before The Matrix) can make some truly thought-provoking sci-fi. The ending is different and interesting, which is something that is lacking in a lot of film endings today.


Knowing has its flaws. The acting is abysmal at times and the score can be a bit overwhelming, though that is probably because Proyas realized that he needed musical cues to tell the audience how to feel because the actors couldn’t convey it. But those problems are dwarfed by the amazing visuals during the multiple disaster sequences and the interesting sci-fi conclusion. So struggle past the acting, because Proyas more than makes up for it in action and story.


Now for my additions upon watching the film on DVD: I still feel pretty much the same about this movie and I actually like it more now that I've seen it again. Cage and Byrne are still bad, but after that first viewing I guess I got used to their bad acting and it didn't stick out to me as much as before, but it's still pretty bad. My main concern was whether or not the CG in the disaster sequences would hold up. I saw this the first time in a non-digital theater, which helps CG out at times. (I can recall being amazed by the Neo vs. hundreds of Smith fight in The Matrix Reloaded when I saw it in the theater, but when I saw it on DVD it looked like a cartoon.) The CG is a bit more apparent on DVD, but it didn't ruin anything for me. The first disaster I mention above (which is a plane crash and is in no way a spoiler anymore since previews for the DVD show and nearly every promotional picture I can find shows Cage standing in front of a crashed plane) is still great and if you have a decent speaker system it's downright awesome. Not sure why I didn't mention it the first time, but that plane crash scene is effective not only because of the shaky camera and everything, but also because it's one long take, which is odd to see when massive CG is involved. It's a jarring scene and makes this film worth a rental at least.


I mention near the end that the music is overwhelming at times in the original review. I don't know what I was talking about now. The score has this old school sci-fi sound to it that completely worked for me. Maybe they just cranked up the volume in the theater or something the first time I saw it, but it certainly didn't overwhelm me this time around.


I want to get into SPOILER territory here to discuss some of the vague sci-fi/biblical elements mentioned in the original review. This movie basically takes a turn into Christian belief when the children are taken to a new planet at the end (by "strangers" who happen to have what look like angel's wings) and set up in an Adam and Eve type situation. This is because the world actually ends. So even though the previews promised some a Day After Tomorrow type disaster movie, the viewer actually got a religion fueled science fiction revelations story. That is very interesting to me. What's most interesting, though, is that people see this ending differently than I do. The commentary track with the director hammers this home as a moderator asks many questions assuming the same things that I do and Proyas completely disagrees with the guy (for the record, Proyas sounds pretty much like a jerk throughout the commentary). I have listened to podcasts and read other reviews that have different ideas for this film as well. That shows me that this film, with all its flaws, requires a bit of thought and that is what good sci-fi is all about with or without the religious aspect.


(continued SPOILERS) I also enjoyed the end of the world scene in which Cage drives through the hectic and decimated city set to Beethoven's 7th Symphony. And seeing the entire world basically catch on fire was pretty cool as well.

Eric Harris - www.canneltoncritic.com

Last updated: 2010-05-10 11:37:29 by user06

Knowing (2009)

Disclaimer - I’m structuring this review in the style of a Nicolas Cage film. So yeah just a lot of random crap that popped into my head.

First of all: There’s a scene where Nicolas Cage is talking to some woman who’s been thrown in as his love interest, and he’s coming clean about how he’s actually been stalking her for a little while and knows all about her family. He delivers this whole speech in his usual stuttery, I-AM-CRAZY fashion, with his hands fidgeting under the table doing what looks like something rather unsavoury. Now I’m going to press play again to see how she reacts. Ha, he gets even crazier. She looks at him like the psycho he is and runs away. I like to think none of this was in the script and the woman isn’t even an actress.

Questions I asked myself: Why did Nicolas Cage give the dark and scary attic-room to his most-likely-traumatised son? Why did the creepy girl at the beginning have a scar on her face? Do we just assume it’s child abuse? Is that it? Was there a child abuse sub-plot that just got thrown away? These are things we the audience should be KNOWING.

Here’s how it ends: No word of a lie, the alien/angel (don’t get me started) things drop the children off on the new planet/heaven (really) and give them unflattering burlap outfits to wear. This new civilisation isn’t going to be very fashion-forward it would seem. The final shot has them frolicking in a meadow and running towards the tree of knowledge. I was expecting Kate Beckinsale and her gypsy family to appear in the sky, but as I’ve said before I never get what I want.

Also: I walked by the poster for this a few months back and thought is was called K Wing cause the letters were obscured by a hair-piece or something. Anyway when I was watching this I started wondering what style of fake hair Nicolas Cage would have in K Wing.

What would K Wing be about?: Well, Nicolas Cage is a renegade mechanic tasked by the NSA with building a time machine, nicknamed K Wing. His mission is to go back in time and slow down the rotation of the earth by small increments so as to decelerate global warming. To do this he’ll need the help of a reclusive and eco-conscious billionaire played by Julianne Moore, who’s divided different parts of the blueprints of K Wing amongst the leaders of the most politically volatile countries in North Africa. With sexy results.

Weird: I wrote that thing about global warming in K Wing before I even knew it was a major plot point in Knowing. That means this film is actually magic and has given me The Knowing.

Last updated: 2010-05-03 00:54:04 by user06

When John finds a pattern in a 50 year old sheet of numbers, he begins to think the world is coming to an end.

While this film has emotional relationships between father and son, and mother and daughter; it lacks a special warmth that is eseential in "doomsday" films. It still has its good points though. The special effects are terrifying. What could be better then the end of the world, then viewing it with stereo sound. You can hear glass break in the back of the theater. I wonder though, the ending being depressing, how you will feel walking out. I only liked it for its effects. The rest of it was depressing, and Nicolas Cage is a terrible actor.

Hannah E.

I know what you're thinking. You liked Knowing? Why yes, yes I did. It jumps right into the plot-an MIT agent, played by Nicolas Cage (very, very convincing in this sci-fi/thriller, really holds his own), must stop national disasters from occurring after his son, played by Chandler Canterbury, discovers a slip of paper that tells the date and death toll of events that have occurred and those that have yet to. It opens with a 1959 classroom full of students drawing pictures for the time capsule that they plan to bury and dig up 50 years from now (so, in other words, present day). Lucille, a Ring style looking little girl, is, instead of coloring, writing a series of numbers on a piece of parchment. After her teacher takes the paper away from her, she flees to the gym closet and finishes scratching the rest of the numbers into a door. It's pretty creepy, and gets you revved up for what's going to happen next. Now, 50 years later, Cage's son (who is a dreadfully bad actor, I'm sad to say) Caleb's class is singing at the grand-unloosening of the time capsule that Lucille's class had previously buried. Each class member gets one of the drawings that the 1950-era students have made for them-except for Caleb. He receives the mysterious numbers that were sketched out by the psychotic child. Soon, Cage's character notices the 9/11 disaster:

"9110127500", written on his son's finding. September 11, 2001. Death toll-2, 7500. Spooky. Knowing is directed and produced by Alex Proyas, who also wrote/directed the cult classic Dark City and directed the Will Smith futuristic action flick I, Robot.

I was thinking to myself throughout the entire film-this kid (Cage's son) is the most depressed thing I have ever seen. His dad's become a depressed alcoholic since his mother passed away (typical scenario), and he doesn't really pay attention to him or show any emotion at all. And get this-his dad actually tells him that Heaven doesn't exist! Who would you do that to a kid, let alone your own son?

The special effects were very cool (the plane crash scene especially). They're very realistic, and all in all a sight for sore eyes. The level of special effect greatness is not among those films such as Michael Bay's Transformers and Peter Jackson's King Kong, but they still leave your mouth ajar. They are similar to Steven Spielberg's sci-fi remake War of the Worlds, though. The explosions, the flames-very much the same. Very much awesome. Speaking of movies likeKnowing, I was also reminded of The Sixth Sense. Caleb claims that these "people" whisper to him. I was just waiting for the horrible child actor to say to Cage "I see dead people."

The story isn't all that original; I was reminded of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening almost entirely. A teacher who tries to stop the world from entering apocalyptic doom. Bor-ing. Maybe, but that doesn't mean that Knowing wasn't a good flick. Sometimes, it does, however. Recall David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button constantly being compared to Robert Zemeckis'sForrest Gump? I found the entire journey to stop the sun from flaming into the Earth's ozone layer to be highly suspenseful and very enjoyable. So enjoyable, in fact, that you forget that the movie is nearly 2 hours long (well, 2 hours and 2 minutes long to be exact).

Despite Canterbury's lousy performance (seriously, he ruins every great scene he's in) and an odd, biblical ending that tones down your feeling towards the plot,Knowing is a spectacular way to get lost in a War of the Worlds-y apocalypse swirling with explosions and pretty sweet special effects. Nicolas Cage gives his all, and it gives Proyas another movie to be braggadocios about.

3/5 burgers.

-Nick

"Knowing" has an awful title, a ridiculous lead actor and a premise that involves children with some connection to a sinister spirit world.

And it's fabulous. Who'da thunk it?

Here's what happens: A young schoolgirl assigned to draw a picture of the future instead pens a long sequence of apparently random numbers. Her list, along with some bad sketches of flying cars, gets buried in a time capsule, where it is retrieved fifty years later and given to the son of MIT instructor Nic Cage.

Cage discovers the numbers are not random. They accurately predict every major catastrophe of the last fifty years, as well as a few that are yet to come.

This remarkable discovery puts Cage's character under a lot of pressure. He must try to avert imminent catastrophes. He must learn everything he can about the little girl, now middle-aged, who wrote the numbers in the first place. At the same time he must ward off a group of mysterious strangers who have an unexplained interest in his son and who, it becomes increasingly clear, are probably not human.

The movie is exciting, scary and suspenseful, despite the presence of some unnecessary "cheap trick" scares, like Nic Cage's sister creeping up behind him to startle him -- and us -- for absolutely no good reason. Directors of thrillers always get paranoid if there isn't a scare every three minutes. I imagine if the writer had directed his own film, he would have shown a subtler touch.

"Knowing" bears an uncanny resemblance to M. Night Shyamalan's alien invasion thriller "Signs." Most strikingly, both movies contain a protagonist who years ago tragically lost his wife and as a consequence has abandoned his faith -- in "Signs" it's faith in God; in "Knowing" it's faith in a universe of purpose or meaning of any kind. In both movies, the end of the world approaches and the protagonist's lack of faith is challenged.

The difference is that "Signs" falls apart at the end, whereas "Knowing" kicks into an even higher gear. I'd like to make some comments about that ending, so I'm going to place them under the following warning:

SPOILER ALERT

Seriously, if you don't want to know how the movie ends, stop reading.

I mean it.

Okay. At the end of the movie the planet Earth gets destroyed by a massive solar flare. This is cool for a number of reasons.

First of all, it's unexpected. The Earth blowing up is a bit of a downer. Hollywood doesn't like downers. You better believe there were story conferences where alternate endings were pitched. But the studio stuck with the appropriate ending, and they deserve credit for it.

Second, the ending forces our boy Cage to fully explore the theme -- namely, what meaning there can be in a universe where death is unavoidable and final. If you let Cage escape death, you cheat both him and the audience.

Third, the ending allows irony into the story. The mysterious strangers, revealed now to be aliens, take Cage's son and a group of other human children to a faraway world to restart human civilization. Cage dies with the knowledge that, while Earth is doomed, humanity is not. Life will go on. Somewhere.

To me, the idea that life will persist even if our lives will not is as intelligent a rationale for optimism as we're likely to find.

It also makes for an extremely climactic ending. Compare with the anti-climaxes of "Signs" or "War of the Worlds," or any other alien apocalypse story that has to bend over backwards to spare humanity in what is always an unsatisfying cop-out.

This is not to say there are no logic problems in "Knowing." Where advanced aliens are involved, there are always logic problems.

My biggest quibble here is: if the aliens have all these spaceships and all this high technology, why didn't they just protect our planet from the solar burst? Surely they could cobble together a large shield or something, especially given fifty years advance notice. Hell, if they'd just given us a heads-up, we'd have had fifty years to do it ourselves. Those aliens may have meant well, but they sorta screwed us over.

Regardless, "Knowing" is a ton of fun at the local cineplex. A Nic Cage sci-fi thriller has absolutely no business being this good.

Score:

How Accomplished: 85/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 90/100

Sci-fi’s heyday has to be the 70s; the aliens were real (or at least they weren’t CGI), every leading man looked like he’d sprung from The Joy of Sex, women weren’t totally relegated to screaming, and John Williams did most of the scores. There was a feeling to 70s sci-fi movies that grown-ups were writing the scripts. Whether it was Richard Dreyfuss’s messy, truthful marriage difficulties in Close Encounters or the bitter, tired wage disputes in Alien, you felt the pulse of these people. Compared with doomy, evangelical schlock like Knowing, even bad 70s sci-fi looks like Bergman. Modern sci-fi owes too much to pixels and not enough to people.

Like most movies of bad omen, Knowing begins in a schoolyard. A spooky-looking girl with a hatchet-made haircut stares ominously at the sky. It’s the 50s. The girl and her classmates have been asked to submit drawings of what the future will look like for a time capsule. The girl writes down a series of numbers. Then she goes insane. Fifty years later, Nicholas Cage and his son are present for the unearthing of the time capsule. Cage’s lad snags the ominous sheet of paper. Nic pores over it – realises it predicts every disaster of the past fifty years according to date, body-count and G.P.S. coordinates – and decides to save the world.

We all know numerology is for Madonna and people who don’t work for a living, so from the outset Knowing is dogged by its premise. One major plausibility point that’s never addressed is: how big is this f—ing sheet of paper?! It would have to be about the size of Detroit to fit even half the world’s disasters on it accurately. But of course, it turns out the magic sheet predicts mostly American catastrophes (so it covers the hotel fire that killed Nic’s on-screen wife, but not the Chinese earthquake last year that killed 70,000). Things wouldn’t be so bad if the movie had a sense of black humour, or at least if it didn’t go all Christian Evangelical about two-thirds of the way through and start equating sci-fi with scripture. But whoever wrote Knowing has obviously been reading waaaaaay too much of those creepy Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye, so by the end you know you’re listening to a sermon.

I have a theory that Nicholas Cage works better without hair. Both his best acting performances (Leaving Las Vegas and Adaptation) were made in an advanced state of hair-loss. The moment he puts on a wig, like a reverse-Samson, he saps his strength. In Knowing, Cage acts like he’s drugged; the way he acts in ninety per cent of his movies. He acts – and looks, half the time – like a weird motion-caption version of Nicholas Cage, as if some lab technician had scanned Nic Cage’s features on a virtual actor, and all you were watching was ones and zeros (like the real Nicholas Cage looking at a cheque). He’s meant to be a M.I.T. professor in Knowing, but it’s the fact he’s meant to be human that takes more swallowing. His reactions are so molasses-like in some scenes, you feel like prodding him with a stick. Something is desperately wrong in the world when the suicidal alcoholic he played inVegas seems infinitely preferable (even relatable) company to the zombie he plays here. There’s no way the firebrand who bedded Cher twenty years ago (add Moonstruck to the bald = good list) would have touched creepy LaHaye-y bullshit like Knowing.

In the 70s, I imagine even sci-fi script conferences took place at Margot Kidder’s place; some balmy California hideaway where everyone had great sex and wrote dialogue that human beings could utter. I don’t know when evangelicals became the new sci-fi demographic, but I shudder to think of what Close Encounters would be like today. No marriage break-up for Richard Dreyfuss. No Dreyfuss, probably. He’d be too scraggly, too human, two-too-many coke-frosted nostrils – too 70s for today’s laptop & Bible crowd. Today, you need a glacial, barely-there star to headline. And if Nicholas Cage seems zoned-out, maybe he just knows how to play it.

I was expecting to laugh at and hate "Knowing" partly because I can't trust Nicholas Cage anymore and because it looked silly and I am tired of these end of the world movies. I will always forgive a great actor for making bad movies because I know he or she will bounce back with a winner but Cage was trying my patience lately.I wound up liking "Knowing" a lot even though if I think about it deeply or saw it again I might change my mind. I was enthralled throughout the movie because I got carried away with the story and Director Alex Proyas does a great job telling the story and creating suspense. I won't give away much here because the fun in watching this is being surprised at what unfolds next. The purpose of my blog is to tell you if a movie is fun and entertaining and that is it. You could pick apart this plot and come up with plot holes and things that make you scratch your head but it is well done and entertaining. Sometimes you need movies where you don't have to think and get carried away. There is a great mood in the film, a little creepiness, some scares and what I thought was a beautiful and touching ending though it could seem corny on a second viewing. There are scary destruction scenes involving a subway train and an airplane that might make you think a little next time before you board them. The movie also looks great and Cage is good as he always is when he does a good movie. So put your brain on hold and sit back and enjoy for I thought this was a fun movie. I will take it over an "Independence Day" or a "Day After Tomorrow" any day.

Vincent Snavely

Last updated: 2010-02-14 04:38:10 by user04

BOTTOM LINE: Over the top and way too serious, “Knowing” plays its prophetic doomsday story out with a heavy-handed sledge hammer; the acting is good, the visuals are marvellous, but the depressing and slightly arthouse climax coupled with an uneven handling of themes make this film a disappointing experience.

THE GOOD: Combining a disaster movie with a mystical prophecy plot is hardly anything new but it always remains a fascinating concept. The idea of a group of kids from the fifties drawing pictures of what they think the future will be like and burying them in a time capsule to be unearthed fifty years later is a good twist, particularly as one of the children hears voices which tell her the dates and locations of every major disaster to occur on the planet for the next fifty years, which she transcribes on to her drawing paper. Nicolas Cage plays single father John Koestler whose son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) is the recipient of the mysterious page of numbers. Soon enough, strange looking people appear in the shadows, and after closer examination, John finds the numbers have meaning. He sets about trying to stop the disasters from occurring, but eventually he realises, there is nothing he can do about the ultimate disaster set to occur when the numbers run out. Director Alex Proyas has been known for combining high concept science-fiction motifs, Hollywood-style execution with an arthouse twist and “Knowing” is no exception. He manages to combine a few big disaster sequences (which look spectacular), some fine acting from the cast (in particularly Nicolas Cage), and then also offer a climax that you are not likely to expect from a Hollywood movie. The film has some good moments of terror, action, character and thrills.

THE BAD: Overkill would be a good way to describe how this film was directed. The central concept is sound, but given the heavy-handedness of the storytelling, it comes across as a little ridiculous. All the characters seem like they are suffering through everything right from the beginning which makes it difficult to watch. The disaster sequences are a little brutal, particularly the airline crash where John watches people on fire jumping out of the burnt remains of the plane, or being visibly caught in subsequent explosions and fireballs. The subway train sequence is the same, with the physical impact of the train wiping out people making the scene hard to sit through. The film is full of plot holes and conveniences; how Nicolas Cage ended up in the exact spot of the first disaster and in turn finding the final piece of the puzzle in decoding the sheet of numbers is one of the most amazing coincidences ever put to film, but the film tries to gets its way around this by playing to the themes of destiny versus random chance, however far-fetched it becomes. The musical score by Marco Beltrami is likewise way over the top. Whenever the “whisper people” show up, the high pitched thriller tones are overbearing to the point where you want to cover your ears. The “whisper people” are also another point of contention; their first appearances are quite creepy, but as the film continues on, an uneven handling of their place in the film makes them lose their effectiveness as the other-worldly focus of the film. Proyas at first seems to suggest that they are aliens who are out to get us, but then when the film shifts tone in the climax to a more religious motif with the idea of settling a new Adam and Eve on another planet to start again, he seems to suggest they are more God-like, particularly in the last shot of them flying away in to space with Caleb and his new friend running through the fields towards the tree of knowledge. “Knowing” seems to sit half way between a great Hollywood disaster movie and a great independent arthouse film but without capturing the elements from either that would make the film great. “Knowing” is an interesting exercise nonetheless, but ultimately disappointing in its execution.

RATING: 5/10

Todd Murphy <br />
http://www.allaboutmovies.net

We live in a day and age where film directors unfortunately rely too much on CGI in order to create special effects (even in movie posters) in order to make the film look realistic. Plus it’s cheap and not very time consuming. But there is something about it that takes away a movie’s beauty. I guess it’s the fact that it has been used so much that it just looks ordinary these days. So I guess it is safe to say that I have never been one to say that people should see a film for its CGI visuals, until now.
 
The film opens up in 1959 where Miss Taylor (Danielle Carter – and if you’re reading this, Danielle, good work) gets her class to draw pictures of what they think the future will look like. Their pictures will then be put in a time capsule that will be opened in 50 years time. Instead, one girl, Lucinda (Lara Robinson), writes a whole page of numbers. 50 years later, John Coestler (Nicolas Cage) takes his son, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) to the event where they retrieve these pictures. As you would expect, Caleb picks up the sheet with the numbers. When his dad, however, notices it lying on the kitchen bench, he is able to see a certain pattern – disasters that occurred post-1959 and even ones that may happen in the future. So it is now up to John to prevent these disasters before time runs out.
 
The CGI visuals in this movie really do steal the show, as you may have already noticed me previously saying. The UFO scene, the one-take plane crash sequence, the apocalyptic ending and the landscape in the film’s last shot are certainly visual highlights but my favourite part is the train crash, which is quite possibly the best part of the film. But the special effects aren’t everything; it has a really thrilling story to tell and there are certainly some moving moments in the scenes between the characters John and Caleb.
 
But it’s not like it’s not without its faults; some of the soundtrack really did sound clichéd, and sometimes dated and unnecessary. And then it also comes to the characters; Rose Byrne’s is an idiot (seriously, what parent leaves their kids behind in a place filled with strangers?) and the actors who play a group of mysterious people are caricatures (after all, we know their mysterious because they are albinos). Furthermore, and maybe worst of all, the film contains unintentional comedy – there is especially a funny scene where Nicolas Cage yells “you want some of this” as he wacks a bat against a tree, all with a straight face.
 
But director Alex Proyas, director of such sci-films as I, Robot and Dark City has created another entertaining film that is both thrilling and deep. Whilst it may not be a sci-fi classic, it is good popcorn fun.

Signing off.

Last updated: 2011-05-05 08:21:44 by Maxie

This is an unexpectedly ambitious movie that not only delivers an exceptional blockbuster experience, but also provides some of the richest food for thought I’ve seen in the genre. It surprises me it was hated by everyone, dismissed as another weak Nicolas Cage film — after all, despite being a great actor, Cage hasn’t been choosing his projects very well.

However, writers Ryne Douglas Pearson, Juliet Snowden, Stiles White and director Alex Proyas have something to say here, and they decide to say it instead of hammering it down our throats, unlike Francis Lawrence did in “I Am Legend” and its pitiful “everything-happens-for-a-reason” ending. Not only they say it, they marry religion and science, determinism and free will, in a narratively superb way, resulting in an intriguing plot that leaves a lot of questions that are supposed to be answered by your own reflections — this is one of those rich films that can be read more than one way, like “The Mist”.

But that side of “Knowing” cannot be properly discussed without spoilers, so I have divided this review in two parts — this one will deal with the film and the second with what it has to say. This first part will not have spoilers.

John Koestler (Cage), a teacher of astrophysics at MIT, comes across a document that was written by a kid fifty years ago, kept in a time capsule at his son’s school and recovered only recently with other futuristic drawings from kids from that classroom. However, this particular kid didn’t do a drawing — she filled the paper with numbers. By accident (or not), Koestler finds a sequence of numbers: 911012996. He alters it to 9/11/01 and finds out the number 2996 is the precise number of deaths of the nine-eleven attacks. And he finds out the document predicts with perfection every accident and its death toll since 1959 — and there are three accidents that have not happened yet, and are about to.

What you have here is a good idea that could have been easily turned into a clever, but ultimately escapist action movie. However, Alex Proyas, an ingenious filmmaker responsible for brilliant films like “The Crow”, “Dark City” and for injecting some common sense into the otherwise mediocre “I, Robot”, refuses to do only that, as I’ll discuss on the second part of this article. But when Proyas is required to stage action scenes, he does so with a competence that rivals the best in the area: not only “Knowing” becomes almost unbearably tense in its third act, the disaster scenes portrayed on it are nothing short of magnificent. One of them is shot in a single take (which significantly magnifies the horror and realism of it) and the other is very well-edited and merciless in showing the loss of human lives. Proyas is also talented at composing breathtaking shots, as the third act makes so clear.

Finally on a good movie, Nicolas Cage does not miss the opportunity to regain some of the respect he had as an actor before crossing paths with hacks like Mark Steven Johnson. He creates a Koestler that is likeable in his devotion to his son — no matter whether he’s being bossy or sweet, there’s always concern for his kid on his eyes — and in his dedication to saving lives after he finds out where and when they’ll end. Cage adds small touches on his performance that are the trademark of a good actor, like his clear awkwardness in trying to talk to a woman he doesn’t know for a reason that cannot be explained to her without sounding ridiculous, and the way he avoids the eyes of a certain character before hugging him.

As Diana, Rose Byrne manages to prevent her character from turning into the potential annoyance it could have been — after all, Diana clearly has a tendency for freaking out. Byrne, however, always manages to make it clear how much she loves her daughter, and how much it frightens her, the possibility of losing her. Not to mention the actress is absurdly convincing in her moments of fear. Ben Mendelsohn’s character, Phil, could also have been a problem, since he’s the one who keeps telling Koestler his opinions on the significance of the document are wrong — but Mendelsohn never has any mean-spirited tone on his voice when he says that, just concern for his troubled friend, which made me like him despite disagreeing with him.

The kids, Lara Robinson and Chandler Canterbury, are both very good, especially the latter — on the scene he sees a vision through his bedroom’s window, the look on his eyes is perfectly balanced — not too scared, not too calm, like he’s incapable of absorbing what he’s seeing.

The script creates good chemistry between characters and deserves applause for avoiding cliches, like one I thought the film would give into but didn’t: a deeper involvement between John and Diana, something that would feel out of place in the film. In fact, the script goes out of its way to flesh out the characters as much as possible while keeping the plot going, and John’s grievance over his wife — who died in a fire — never feels like something added just to give him depth. It feels real. The speech he gives while driving the car, about how he thought we were supposed to feel when our loved ones are in danger, is very well-written and one of Nicolas Cage’s best moments in the film.

Marco Beltrami composes a good score that only occasionally resorts to high-pitched chords to punctuate some events. For most of the film, the score is just efficient. In the ending, it becomes downright beautiful, aiding Proyas in awing the spectator with some absolutely amazing shots (and with the symbolic meaning of the ending, discussed in the next part of this article). The use of Beethoven in one of the final scenes is a brilliant touch. Richard Learoyd’s editing is superb and Simon Duggan’s cinematography is gorgeous in its sadness and opressiveness — I especially like the sun beams through the leaves as John makes a much-delayed phone call (considering the part the sun plays in the story, it’s a clever way of adding urgency as well as beauty to the scene), and the composition of most shots is well-executed (especially one in the ending, when a number of stones start lifting weightlessly from the ground, under circunstances I won’t explain).

With a brave ending that is symbolically beautiful in its significance, “Knowing” is not only an entertaining, awe-inspiring blockbuster that delivers on its responsibilities as such — it is also top-of-the-notch science fiction, thought-provoking, clever and technically magnificent. It truly is a mystery to me why this movie was considered by so many to be bad — it might not be as great as I think it is, but allow me to say “bad” is an even bigger exaggeration.

PART 2 (SPOILEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERS!)

I said this movie marries religion and science, free will and determinism. Allow me to explain this by first making my own beliefs clear:

I am an atheist and life, to me, is just an accident. However, determinism doesn’t seem wrong to me. The idea of the future already being written is not preposterous — what sounds to me preposterous is the idea of it having been written by SOMEONE. I like to think that since the Big Bang, life has been randomly determined — much like the past is a straight, unalterable line, the future is a straight but alterable line — and if someone outside the line can tell us what we’ll do, we can change our future actions. If they don’t, we don’t even know what our future actions will be, so how to change them? This does not mean we don’t have free will, only that what we’ll do is already known by the universe — but not by us. In fact, if we go into quantum physics, there could be billions of dimensions where life has been randomly determined in billions of different ways and this is just one dimension, but for fuck’s sake let’s keep this (as) simple (as possible).

This is how I read “Knowing”: the aliens in the film have seen the future of Earth being destroyed by a Coronal Mass Ejection and decided to interfere, engineering a sequence of actions that they could predict would lead to the salvation of some of Earth’s inhabitants. By that logic, they found out that if they made Lucinda Embry draw all those numbers, they would fall into Koestler’s hands, and ultimately he would lead his son right to them while not depriving the kid from being capable of choosing his own fate, and THAT’S where the film marries beautifully with the concept of Free Will:

Even thought the aliens carefully manipulated the sequence of events to lead up to the ending of the film, in the end Caleb is offered a choice — to go or not to go with them. Which is why the aliens don’t simply kidnap him — they want not only for him to choose, but they want his father to understand as well, even if they can’t save him — and this is confirmed by the way one of the aliens, before departing with John’s son, gives John a curt, easily-missed nod, as if saying “thank you”.

Of course, it may sound insane that they could predict Koestler’s actions to such accurate degree, but the thing is they didn’t — it’s no wonder they keep appearing to him and his son, trying to steer him into the right direction. They constantly interfere to make sure Koestler will give them his son, and that he’ll understand WHY, before he has to accept his own death.

Proyas does not exclude religion from this equation, and gives some nods to it, creating a parallel between religion and science in the way the aliens also resemble angels — when they are in human form, they are pale and ghostly, and when they are in alien form, they have faint wings made out of light. And they appear in four — The Four Knights Of The Apocalypse. Not to mention the last shot of the film, an obvious reference to Adam and Eve — except that, once again proving the film’s thematic ambiguity, the Forbidden Tree is seen with spaceships taking off in the background and surrounded by a vegetation known as solar penumbral filaments, which do not exist on Earth.

So does this film defend Intelligent Design, you ask?

No. It plays with several scientific and religious concepts, and Intelligent Design is just one. It uses religious symbolism to convey more than one meaning. In fact, “Knowing” can be seen by Intelligent Design people as a movie that defends it, and by people like me, who believe in Science, it can be seen simply as a movie about how the universe is so much bigger than humanity, about how we act in the face of death, and about how we can be gone any second and it won’t make the slightest difference. It can be seen so many ways, and that is the beauty of it. That’s why it’s so great.

So it seems the Intelligent Design people thought it defended science and the scientific people thought it defended Intelligent Design and almost nobody liked the film.

It even gives a nod to religion in the way it can help us find comfort, such as in the ending, when Koestler and his father tell each other that “this isn’t the end”. It MIGHT be. But what’s the use of freaking out about it?

In “Knowing”, the determinism can be random, and the higher power isn’t God, it’s alien lifeforms — that also look like angels. This is the beautiful way this film gathers so many concepts to craft a narrative with, and it’s amazing how coherent it is despite dealing with so much. The superb, beautifully-directed ending enriches the story to a level that made me reflect afterwards, and I like it when a movie makes me think about what it has to say, about the questions it asks.

Instead of trying to convince me it has all the right answers. Which nobody does.

(Roger Ebert liked this film as much as I did, and his review, as well as the articles he wrote about it (linked on the end of his review), are very good.)

Written by André Navarro on August 22nd 2009 

http://andrenavarro.wordpress.com/

Last updated: 2009-12-22 12:13:21 by andre_navarro

I sat, I watched and I feel cheated.  The first half of Knowing is an amazing film.   Riveting, intelligent, well written, perfectly acted, beautifully shot.   Almost a masterpiece and certainly the best science fiction film in  ages!!  Sadly, it has a second half.  Dark  City is one of my 10 favourite films of all time, the recent  director's cut reaffirmed its place even more. Alex Proyas is a gifted  science fiction director, The Crow was great, he showed his diversity outside of the genre with Garage Days which I also quite  enjoyed. Robot was his first  "commercial film" and a return to sci fi and until now I felt was the  weakest of his directorial credits.  What happened? I note around the  net that this film met particularly divided results, it seems to be a  love / hate relationship... I didn't hate it, but I certainly didn't  love it.  It could have been soo much more.

I am looking forward  to listening to the audio commentary, Proyas is quite articulate when it  comes to explaining his thoughts and motives and I am hoping he can  help explain his film to me on a level that might help me to better  appreciate it.....but until then.... Knowing is a film with so much promise that fails to deliver on it.

Last updated: 2010-04-25 17:52:46 by Anamnesis