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Knowing is a film trying to discuss bigger ideas than it gives itself room for. It touches on classic philosophical themes, such as the dueling concepts of free will and determinism, but never delves beneath the surface. It name drops concepts a good deal deeper than it's willing to examine.
The film's hook is simple: an elementary school opens a time capsule buried 50 years prior, and lets the children see what their 1950s counterparts left for them. One of the children, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) receives a piece of paper full of random numbers, originally scrawled by a disturbed young girl. His father, John Koestler (Nicholas Cage), sees the numbers and notices a pattern: the numbers seem to predict the date (and number of casualties) of every major disaster in modern history. What's more: there are three sets of numbers left.
The setup would've been novel twenty years ago, but these days it's tempting to write this off as an excuse to blow up computer-generated landmarks. But Knowing's problems are a good deal more complicated than that. Don't let the trailers fool you: this is not a normal, mediocre disaster movie -- it goes wrong in much more interesting ways.
The first 30 minutes of the film consists of nothing but well-worn movie clichés and transparent setup. It's all here: the precocious child, the protagonist with the familial trauma in his recent past, the estranged father, and my personal favorite: people opting to use flashlights instead of light switches.
As conventional and overdone as these things are, they serve the inadvertent purpose of lulling us to sleep before the film snaps to life for the first on-screen disaster. These disasters are where the film shines: the sense of dread leading up to each catastrophe is palpable, and no punches are pulled in their horrific depictions. Sound is used to great effect in each instance. Though there isn't anything particularly gory about each accident, the unflinching way in which they're shown stretches the boundaries of the film's PG-13 rating. This isn't Independence Day, and there are no pithy one-liners; just tragedy and suffering.
Once the disaster ends, the film switches back from Jekyll to Hyde as Cage's character slowly unravels the puzzles of the remaining numbers. Mysterious, foreboding men dressed in black routinely pop up just long enough to look, well, mysterious and foreboding. The eventual revelation of who they are and what they're doing makes their previous aloofness inexplicable, but they do their job in the moment; they definitely manage to forebode.
There are some twists and turns throughout the film's 121-minute runtime, but observant viewers will be able to pick up on a number of faux-cryptic lines that make the bulk of the finale fairly plain. The ending evolves throughout the first three-fourths of the film, and then devolves thereafter. It reaches a number of acceptable stopping points, but just keeps going, showing more than it needs to for longer than is necessary.
The eventual conclusion touches on some concepts that seem increasingly in vogue in Hollywood circles, and have been suggested by other science fiction properties more than once. Viewed with any distance, however, the film's seemingly grand answers about humanity's past and future amount to little more than an intellectual punt.
There is some parallel between the film's themes and Koestler's personal development, but his story is started unimaginatively and never brought full circle. Cage is miscast here, if only because his recent career suggests a very different film than the one we end up getting. Given director Alex Proyas' pedigree (Dark City, I, Robot), one suspects that Knowing would be received much differently -- and attract a very different audience -- with a less recognizable lead.
Judging Knowing as a whole is difficult; it often feels as if two different screenwriters and directors alternated scenes for the fun of it. A bit of research shows that the film was first written roughly a decade ago, and has been rewritten heavily since. There might have been an interesting film near the beginning of this process, but as presented it drowns its strengths in a sea of banality, and short shrifts the concepts it pretends to explore.
The film's hook is simple: an elementary school opens a time capsule buried 50 years prior, and lets the children see what their 1950s counterparts left for them. One of the children, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) receives a piece of paper full of random numbers, originally scrawled by a disturbed young girl. His father, John Koestler (Nicholas Cage), sees the numbers and notices a pattern: the numbers seem to predict the date (and number of casualties) of every major disaster in modern history. What's more: there are three sets of numbers left.
The setup would've been novel twenty years ago, but these days it's tempting to write this off as an excuse to blow up computer-generated landmarks. But Knowing's problems are a good deal more complicated than that. Don't let the trailers fool you: this is not a normal, mediocre disaster movie -- it goes wrong in much more interesting ways.
The first 30 minutes of the film consists of nothing but well-worn movie clichés and transparent setup. It's all here: the precocious child, the protagonist with the familial trauma in his recent past, the estranged father, and my personal favorite: people opting to use flashlights instead of light switches.
As conventional and overdone as these things are, they serve the inadvertent purpose of lulling us to sleep before the film snaps to life for the first on-screen disaster. These disasters are where the film shines: the sense of dread leading up to each catastrophe is palpable, and no punches are pulled in their horrific depictions. Sound is used to great effect in each instance. Though there isn't anything particularly gory about each accident, the unflinching way in which they're shown stretches the boundaries of the film's PG-13 rating. This isn't Independence Day, and there are no pithy one-liners; just tragedy and suffering.
Once the disaster ends, the film switches back from Jekyll to Hyde as Cage's character slowly unravels the puzzles of the remaining numbers. Mysterious, foreboding men dressed in black routinely pop up just long enough to look, well, mysterious and foreboding. The eventual revelation of who they are and what they're doing makes their previous aloofness inexplicable, but they do their job in the moment; they definitely manage to forebode.
There are some twists and turns throughout the film's 121-minute runtime, but observant viewers will be able to pick up on a number of faux-cryptic lines that make the bulk of the finale fairly plain. The ending evolves throughout the first three-fourths of the film, and then devolves thereafter. It reaches a number of acceptable stopping points, but just keeps going, showing more than it needs to for longer than is necessary.
The eventual conclusion touches on some concepts that seem increasingly in vogue in Hollywood circles, and have been suggested by other science fiction properties more than once. Viewed with any distance, however, the film's seemingly grand answers about humanity's past and future amount to little more than an intellectual punt.
There is some parallel between the film's themes and Koestler's personal development, but his story is started unimaginatively and never brought full circle. Cage is miscast here, if only because his recent career suggests a very different film than the one we end up getting. Given director Alex Proyas' pedigree (Dark City, I, Robot), one suspects that Knowing would be received much differently -- and attract a very different audience -- with a less recognizable lead.
Judging Knowing as a whole is difficult; it often feels as if two different screenwriters and directors alternated scenes for the fun of it. A bit of research shows that the film was first written roughly a decade ago, and has been rewritten heavily since. There might have been an interesting film near the beginning of this process, but as presented it drowns its strengths in a sea of banality, and short shrifts the concepts it pretends to explore.