It makes no sense to reference I, Robot when his best two films are The Crow and Dark City.
This has nothing to do with the film as far as I know but there always seems to be leaves falling in every outdoor scene in this film.
I have made my theory of the two Nicolas/Nic Cages public recently, in this film we see far more of the “Movie Star” Nic, he is back overpronouncing things that don’t require it and brooding his way through other scenes, though in the couple of scenes that count he is equally effective at being realistically overawed by circumstances.
And Knowing is a film where, if it were reality the circumstances should be overawing.
I have had this on the shelf since it came out on DVD a few months back, at various times I have even dragged it down to re-read the back cover and gone with something else. Why I never bothered putting it in I can’t say, it looked OK but obviously just never grabbed my attention.
Knowing is a film that requires the suspension of disbelief, but then so too does The Sixth Sense, Aliens and Terminator 2, and we easily manage with them and they are considered classics. For some reason this has been panned a little for being unbelievable yet a child who can see and interact with dead people does not.
In any case the first 90 minutes of Knowing is consistently engaging and for a few minutes outstanding. Unfortunately though it is let down a little through overreaching just a little in the last quarter.
Nic Cage plays John, a university lecturer whose wife has passed away and who lives with his son Caleb, who at age 11 ish is finding his way in life and as such is both idealistic (annoying) and wants to be more independent.
Caleb attends a school where 50 years previous a time capsule was buried (shown in a brief earlier sequence), on the day of the unearthing each child at the school gets to open an envelope left by a student 50 years prior, Caleb of course gets the one that sets events in motion.
Two things before proceeding:
1/ The Time Capsule was “unearthed” by two hooks, there was no code, padlock or preventative measures in place to stop theft, and it was in the middle of an open courtyard. You’re expecting me to think that for 50 years no mischievous kids thought to pull it up and fill it with dog poop? Or used socks?
2/ The film revolves around an intricate code left by one of the students. 99.99% recurring of the population would have turfed it after a momentary glance, and even if they had decided to look into it there was no way in hell they could decipher it. The movie would be better served if it were titled Not Knowing, but that movie wouldn’t have been made would it?
Caleb instantly forgets the page filled with numbers, though he does take it home where John somehow deciphers a code from it.
In essence some of the numbers relate to historic (and future) dates, followed by numbers which relate to mortality figures in disasters that occurred on those dates, the nerve wracking thing is that there are more dates to come, and that they are all in the near future.
John goes to visit the teacher who was present at the original time capsule burial, we find that the girl who wrote the code was a little odd, and that after writing the code she was found in a dark room in a sort of trance. (Things the audience knew from the first scene by the way.)
So far, so what really.
But the best scene in the film has John stuck in a traffic jam on the way to pick up Caleb from school, as he waits in traffic he realizes what the other numbers in the code refer to, and his theory is instantly and spectacularly proven correct when a plane falls from the sky in a terrible crash that is both horrible and wayyy cool.
The fun bit, there are two disasters left before the code finishes, so now John knows where these events will occur, and the likely death toll, except that the final death toll simply says “EE”, instead of numbers.
(Needless to say when they find out what the code means it’s a bit of a bummer.)
John has a decision, does he go to the site of the future disaster or stay the hell away?
I’ll leave that for you to find out, but after a slowish start I found the middle hour of the film quite immersive, even when the circumstances became more convoluted through the introduction of more characters I still wanted to see where it was going. It was only towards the end that I felt the plot went a little too far in trying to ramp up the cool factor that I got a little annoyed.
This is a Nic Cage movie, he carries the entire thing and it largely revolves around his performance, which is fine as he is believable here, Rose Byrne comes in after a while as the daughter of the code writing little girl (she had Rose once she was an adult obviously) and does the whole “This can’t be real” thing for just long enough without it being tiring, and the two kids (by the end) are only mildly annoying mostly.
The centerpiece is really the plane crash, for the few minutes leading up to it and the thirty or so minutes after I was hooked and willing to take whatever leap of disbelief they asked of me, only they kept ratcheting up the action and overstepped the mark just enough that they managed to reduce the impact.
I still think that Knowing is a fine film and worthy of a look, it doesn’t really go off the rails, but the ending did end up costing it some realism and impact, and I thought that by simply toning down a couple of things this could have been a great film.
As it stands I put it near Déjà Vu as movies with noticeable flaws, but that are good enough that you are willing to ignore or move past them because the filmmakers tried to make something different, unique and exceptional, even though in both cases they didn’t quite get there.
Final Rating – 7.5 / 10. If ever a Director’s Cut was needed, this would be it. This could have actually been improved by removing (only) a couple of things. Right now though it is still good, just not great.
