‘Knowing’ Review

Release Date: 3/20/09

Knowing, directed by Alex Proyas, is a sci-fi drama starring none other then Nicolas “I haven’t made a good movie since Con Air “ Cage.  The plot of film is very interesting about a time capsule buried 50 years ago, which contains a list of numbers which turn out to predict every natural disaster of the past 5 decades with 3 sets of numbers left to go.  The director Alex Proyas who made sci-fi cult classics like Dark City and The Crow and more recently the mediocre I, Robot, seems to be making increasingly worse films, because Knowing is a bad film and it doesn’t help with the casting of Nicolas Cage.

The story starts in 1959; Lucinda Embry (Lara Robinson) is a student at a newly opened elementary school. Lucinda’s suggestion of inserting a time capsule into the ground at the school’s dedication ceremony to be opened in 50 years was the winning suggestion. All the children in Lucinda’s class drew pictures of what they believed would occur in the future except for Lucinda, who wrote rows of random numbers on the entire page. In 2009, the time capsule is opened and the new generation of students is given the envelopes with the pictures inside. Lucinda’s envelope ends up in the hands of Caleb Koestler (Chandler Canterbury). Caleb’s father, MIT Professor Astrophysicist John Koestler (Nicolas Cage), looks at the numbers and doesn’t think anything about it. Then he accidentally and ridiculously stumbles onto what the numbers mean. The encoded message predicts with exact accuracy the dates, death tolls, and locations of every major disaster during the last 50 years, and three events that have not yet occurred, so it’s up to cage to get to the bottom of it and warn the entire world what is going to happen.

The plot of this film is outrageous. In the beginning it starts as a mildly entertaining story with horrible acting, and increasingly gets more bizarre and more far-fetched.  In the conclusion I was wondering what the writers were thinking taking a cliché approach to the third act of the film.  I can’t really talk much more about that without giving anything away.

Knowing reminded me at parts of The Happening, M. Night Shyamalan’s crapfest from last year and moviewiseguys worst rated movie of 2008.  The film had parts that could have been suspenseful or emotional, but ended up getting awkward laughs from the crowd.  I must have laughed out loud at least a dozen times.  This is in part the fault of the actors.  I don’t know what’s wrong with Nicolas Cage’s career, but after films like The Wicker Man, Ghost Rider, Next, Bangkok Dangerous, and now Knowing, its amazing that this man once won an Oscar.

The disaster scenes themselves are on the other hand awesome with dazzling special effects. These scenes are well constructed and well shot and become the highlight of a dull film, showing the horror of the disasters very effectively.  Special effects do not make a good film though, story and acting are the things that usually do and this film fails with those two aspects miserably.

So, if Knowing is half the battle, don’t go see this Nic Cage disaster of a film. Cause it’s fuckin’ WHACKED!

IMDB: N/A

Rotten Tomatoes: N/A

Moviewiseguys: 4.5/10