Knowing
Rated: PG-13
Runtime: 2 hours, 10 minutes
Directed by: Alex Proyas
Starring:
Nicolas Cage - John Koestler
Chandler Canterbury - Caleb Koestler
Rose Byrne - Diana Wayland
Lara Robinson - Lucinda Embry / Abby Wayland
I wasn't holding out a lot of hope for Knowing. None of the trailers had impressed me and every element I'd seen seemed unbearable: intense Nic Cage, numerology, creepy, dead-eyed psychic child, end-of-the-world set pieces but not an ounce of humanity to be found. I will say this for Knowing—the trailer sold it for what it was.
The film begins in 1959 where creepy, dead-eyed girl writes a bunch of numbers down on a page and then it's buried in a time capsule along with her classmates' predictions of the future. Fifty years later, a young student named Caleb gets the girl's creepy sheet of numbers and he also starts hearing creepy whispering and seeing sinister figures in black trench coats that don't offer him candy and a ride in their super-fun, sleepy-time van (they later give him a shiny black rock so they need to work on their sexual molestation game). Because Caleb is nothing like a real child (made all the worse by the fact that actor Chandler Canterbury may, on a very good day, have barely enough acting talent for a cereal commercial), he doesn't tell his dad about the voices or the scary figures stalking him.
But that's okay because his dad John (Nicolas Cage) is too busy mourning the loss of his wife, drinking himself into oblivion at night (but never suffering a hangover), and creeping out his MIT students by telling them that rather than everything in the universe being determined, everything is a crap shoot and shit just happens. If only there was a God and we didn't have free will, everything would be so much better. Thankfully, John soon meets the sheet of creepy numbers and they fall in crazy, paranoid love.
John notices the numbers 911012996 and after working it through at the pace of a slow child while the audience screams "9/11!" at the top of their lungs, John finally crosses the finish line and sees that the creepy, dead-eyed girl wrote September 11th, 2001 and predicted that 2,996 people would die that day. That's when John starts noticing a pattern and sees that the girl predicted every major "tragedy" (Not that 9/11 wasn't a tragedy but I'll explain why I put it in quotations in a second) of the past fifty years. Of course, John magically knows where these numbers start and stop even though there are gaps of numbers between the date/death-toll numbers (later revealed to be latitude and longitude of the tragedy but without decimal points). How does John know where to stop and start? You go one number over and you've changed the location and the date and since he doesn't figure out the latitude/longitude problem till about fifty minutes into the movie, he's just guessing catastrophes.
That's the other problem: how do you define a tragedy? This was an easy problem that they just skipped because they needed their precious set-pieces later in the film. If they had just defined these "tragedies" as "acts of God", i.e. natural disasters, then it would have provided some weight to the whole determinism angle the film is going for. Instead, you have dates like 9/11 where it's not an act of God but an act of Man and while most of the world would define it as a senseless tragedy, if you're in Al-Qaeda, that date wouldn't be a tragedy to you. Furthermore, what qualifies as a tragedy? How many people have to die to make creepy, dead-eyed girl's list? More than 40? More than 30? I'd say Columbine was a tragedy but only 13 people died so is it not tragic enough?
From its nonsensical spooky event, the film just gets worse until its relentlessly punishing its audience for a crime they didn't commit. Unless he's acting warm and paternal (an admirable quality for a guy that downs a bottle of whiskey a night but can never get drunk), Nic Cage just defaults to Intense-mode and as if trying to convince people of the numbers' predictive power didn't make you seem crazy, Cage is there to let his wild-eyes do the talkin'. Even stranger, Cage starts to seek out the events and the film, in the most bizarre, twisted way, wants us to believe that if everything has been pre-determined, then that's a good thing. I'll get back to this but it's gonna get spoilery so let me first tell you about the other terrible things in this film:
Rose Byrne plays the daughter of creepy, dead-eyed girl (yep, even though creepy dead-eyed girl never got any saner, some dude apparently found her psychosis a huge turn-on and knocked her up) and the film has no love for her character. She exists to believe the insane ramblings of her now-deceased mother (guess she didn't see that one comin!) and Nic Cage who she tries to match for sheer hysteria and I just about lost it as they scream at each other over the phone (by the way, the cell phones don't work because of solar flares but Nic Cage's magically does because the film needs it to) and Cage shouts "THE CAVES WON'T SAVE US!" and she cries back "WE HAVE TO THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" You won't be able to assemble a Wicker Man-quality YouTube video of clips from Knowing but you can come close.
Finally, before I get to talking about the atrociousness of the ending, I have to say that director Alex Proyas cannot be trusted with a budget. Not only does the CG look terrible, the way he cuts the actions scenes together is laughable. There's a plane crash that's fairly impressive until we see yet another person on fire and it's clear that Proyas is out of ideas. There's a subway crash that's even worse as Proyas selects shots that turn what should be a horrific scene into one that's unintentionally hilarious.
Speaking of unintentionally hilarious, allow me to discuss the ending (again, this is going to be spoilery so if you're still dead-set on seeing this film, don't read any further). Basically, the creepy girl predicts the end of the universe but the guys dressed in black trench coats who all look like they stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine are there to abduct Caleb and Rose Bryne's daughter, Abby, and start over on a different planet. On this point, I wish I could applaud the film for being ballsy. Yes, it's poorly acted, directed, paced, scored, and shot but if you can make a $60 million film that slides intelligent design and the end of days into your mainstream Hollywood flick, then I'm impressed even though I think both those concepts are ludicrous and play to one of the worst elements of American society. But the film doesn't have the balls and the ending is some wishy-washy notion of these trench-coated gentlemen being aliens but they're also angels. Basically, the film allows you to pick which one you think is less stupid. The aliens then pick up the kids, drop them on a new planet with a couple of rabbits (hint, hint pre-pubescent kids) and allow everything they ever loved on earth to be destroyed by a solar flare. The film thinks it avoided pissing off science-minded viewers with extra-terrestrials and avoided pissing off religious viewers with angels (plus the Tree of Life or Knowledge at the end on the new planet) but really it just insults anyone with a mildly functional brain.
Words by
Matt Goldberg
3.18.09